Learning Activity
This box will prompt you to engage in course concepts, often by viewing resources, applying concepts, and reflecting on your learning experience. Learning activities are designed to prepare you for the graded assigments in this course. You are strongly encouraged to complete them.
LDRS 101: Learning with Technology
Welcome
This is the course book for LDRS 101: Learning with Technology. This book is divided into 6 units of study to help you engage with the course learning outcomes and prepare for the course assessment.
On the page below you will find a summary of the course syllabus, as well as how to navigate this book. Please also refer the schedule in Moodle, as well as the Assessment section in Moodle for instructions on assignments.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. We are here to help and be your guide on this journey.
The syllabus includes key information about the course schedule, assignments, and policies. Please read the full course syllabus, which you will find in Moodle. For information on how to navigate through this course on Moodle, see here.
Course Description
Introduces theories and competencies related to learning and thriving in a digital world. Explores how learners are situated in ‘the digital’ throughout their lives and how they can use digital technologies to enhance and enrich their experience of learning, working, and playing. Learners will begin to build a curated digital footprint, initiate and develop personal and professional learning networks; develop competencies to allow them to evaluate and choose digital platforms and tools that are safe and ethical; and explore how to use digital technologies to discover, curate, connect, and share knowledge with their communities.
Course Learning Outcomes
- Build and customize technology-integrated workflows to enhance and enrich your learning journey.
- Apply digital literacy skills to evaluate the legitimacy, credibility, and reliability of online resources for academic study.
- Practice evaluative judgment to document your process of learning in complex domains of knowledge.
- Create a personalized narrative to document and express your learning process.
- Evaluate digital tools, platforms, and interactions based on ethical principles.
- Develop personal and professional learning networks to discover and share knowledge, collaborate with others, and become engaged digital global citizens.
- Create inclusive digital communities which embody a sense of belonging, connection, and Christian hospitality.
Course Notes
Course Units
This course is organized into 6 units. Each unit of the course will provide you with the following information:
- A general overview of the key concepts and skills that will be addressed during the unit.
- Specific learning outcomes and topics for the unit.
- Learning activities to help you engage with the concepts and practice digital skills. These often include key readings, videos, exploring digital tools, and reflective prompts.
- The Assessment section provides details on assignments you will need to complete throughout the course to demonstrate your understanding of the course learning outcomes.
Course Activities
Below is some key information on features you will see throughout the course.
Assessment
This box will signify an assignment you will submit to your instructor for grading and feedback. Note that assignments demonstrate your understanding of the course learning outcomes. Be sure to review the grading rubrics for each assignment.
Checking Your Learning
This box is for checking your understanding, to make sure you are ready for the next unit.
Note
This box signifies key notes, important quotes, or case studies. It may also warn you of possible problems or pitfalls you may encounter!
Course Technologies
This course is about learning with technology. Digital literacies are closely linked but not limited to digital skills. Consequently, this course will use a number of different online communication and publishing technologies to support your learning.
An open philosophy of inclusion
Learning with Technology incorporates a wide range of online technologies and software applications. In this course we want to promote free and open source software because we believe that no learner should be denied access to learning for lack of funds to purchase a proprietary software license. Nor do we believe that you should be forced to sacrifice your freedoms in software choice.
The course resources and interaction technologies are based entirely on free and open source software and you will be able to complete all the learning activities using open source applications without the need to purchase any software. You are free to use proprietary technology applications of your choice, but you can also use this course to explore and experiment with open technology.
Summary of technologies used on this course
The following table provides a summary of the main technologies used in this course.
| Technology | Details |
|---|---|
| Moodle | TWU uses Moodle as our Learning Management System. For LDRS 101, your course notes, assignment instructions, assignment dropboxes will be found in Moodle. Note that some assignments require you to complete your work in WordPress and Discourse. |
| Course Book | Course materials are organized into the Course Book tab in Moodle and contain the instructions to guide your learning. Bookmark this page in your browser. |
| Discourse | Discourse is a free, open source social network which is hosted at https://twu.discourse.group/ (bookmark this page). We use Discourse in this course for discussions. Go to the LDRS101 forums in Discourse to explore some of the topics you might engage with during this course. |
| Obsidian | Obsidian is a free note-taking and mind-mapping app. We introduce this digital tool early on in the course as you will use it often for your journal reflections, and for your assignments. |
| Litmaps | Litmaps is a web app that you can use to discover and manage resources. In this course you will use Litmaps to build a map of the literature related to topics you want to research. |
| Zotero | Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. |
| Hypothes.is | We use Hypothes.is, an open source web-service that enables users to annotate, discuss and share reflections on web site pages on the Internet. |
| WordPress | In Unit 4 we introduce WordPress, a free, open-source platform used to create websites and blogs. Learners are invited to establish their own personal course blog. In this way you will retain control over your own data even when the course is finished. We recommend WordPress as this tool is supported by TWU, but you may use a blogging platform of your choice. |
| Zoom | Zoom is a communications platform that allows you to connect via video, audio, phone, or chat. Note the Live version of this course may use Zoom for class sessions. Students are also encouraged to attend Learning Hub workshops via Zoom. |
Learn by Doing
Some learners will be familiar with these technologies, while others will be using them for the first time. We use a learn by doing approach and you will be prompted in the course materials when to interact with these different technologies.
Initially the use of different technologies distributed on the web may be confusing. However, this is a course about learning on the Internet and once you have completed this course, you will become a competent user of these online technologies.
Have fun and enjoy the learning experience!
Introduction to Digital Literacies for Online Learning
Overview
Welcome to Unit 1 of Learning with Technology! This course will introduce you to some ideas related to living, learning, and working in our digitally-saturated society. It is our intent to equip you with an emerging set of skills and literacies related to digital tools for learning. Within your academic pursuits, you will encounter a vast amount of information, and integrating digital tools into your learning journey, though challenging, is essential for harnessing the ample learning possibilities offered by your chosen discipline. This course will give you a head start on using digital tools to build a workflow, enabling you to stay organized and to make your learning process visible to both yourself and your instructors. We will also lead you through readings and discussions on topics such as digital identity, privacy, security, and ethical ways of sharing newfound knowledge.
There will be two primary branches of the course, each focusing on specific tools that we will introduce to you. The first branch will be a workflow that is private to you because it takes place primarily on your own computer, and the second branch is shared as publicly as you are comfortable sharing. You will have control over how public your work is, but we will think about the importance of sharing knowledge and how to do that easily and in ways that preserve your ‘ownership’ over your work.
In this first unit, there will be both theoretical and practical work for you to do. We start with some basic instructions and advice on technology and learning online. Then, in order to build a theoretical understanding of digital tools for learning, we will explore the idea of the digital in the context of contemporary society. At the same time, there are some important practicalities to manage in order to get set up for the course, so we will lead you through installing some apps on your computer that you will use extensively in this course, and which hopefully will become the backbone of your digital workflow throughout your time in higher education and beyond.
Topics
This unit is divided into the following topics:
- Learning Online
- Understanding the Digital
- Starting your Workflow
- Digital Literacies
- Digital Privacy and Safety
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit, you should be able to:
- Explore common digital tools used at Trinity Western University.
- Describe your engagement with digital technology.
- Apply digital tools to support learning in an academic environment.
- Explain what digital literacy means to you.
- Examine privacy concerns related to various platforms and tools.
- Describe how to protect yourself and others in the digital environment.
- Identify the literacies you plan to improve and what steps you will take to achieve your goals.
Activity Checklist
Here is a checklist of learning activities you will benefit from in completing this unit. You may find it useful for planning your work.
Learning Activities
- Reflect on why you chose TWU and share your expecations with your peers.
- Write an introduction post on the Learning Hub in Discourse.
- Search online for learning tools to help with note-taking, project managment, writing, etc. Share your findings on Discourse.
- Download and install Obsidian.
- Download and open the course vault in Obsidian. Activate the plugins that came with the Obsidian vault.
- View the resources provided on the 21st century learner.
- Create a Visitors and Residents diagram.
- Get a password manager.
- Use the Terms of Service: Didn’t Read website to look up each of the apps we will learn in this course.
- Write a reflection on digital literacies in your learning journal.
Notes:
- You will be directed to complete these activities as they come up in the unit.
- The learning activities in this course are designed to prepare you for the graded assigments in this course. You are strongly encouraged to complete them.
- If you plan to complete this course in 12 weeks, this unit should take 9-12 hours to complete.
Assessment
- Assignment 1: Learning Journal - submit after you have completed Units 1-3.
See the Assessment section in Moodle for assignment details.
Resources
- All resources will be provided online in the unit.
Activity: Why TWU?
Before we dive in to some digital tools you may use in your academic studies at Trinity, let’s pause and think about what TWU means to you. Why did you choose TWU? What do you hope to achieve during your time here?
To give you some idea of what life is like at TWU, and why people choose TWU, watch the following video: Discover Undergraduate Studies at Trinity Western University
Questions to Consider
What do you think? Consider the following prompts:
- I’m excited to join the TWU community because …
- I have questions about TWU: …
- I am confident that …
- I am concerned about …
Activity: Join the Hub!
Head over to the Learning Hub, which is an app called Discourse that we use to build community among learners in online courses. Find the Leadership 101 category and respond to the Welcome forum. As you introduce yourself, share your thoughts and questions you have about TWU.
Learning Online
In face-to-face teaching environments, the requirement to physically attend class, coupled with community accountability, makes a learner’s individual learning skills less relevant for academic success. However, when learning online there is less instructor oversight, motivation, and accountability, requiring the student to have the skills required to learn effectively. While a face-to-face instructor may notice that their student is absent, confused, or falling behind, and will check in on their well-being and offer support for their success, an online instructor often has less opportunity to do this. The learner is therefore required to have strong learning skills, recognize their responsibility as a self-directed learner, and practice these skills accordingly.
Online learning requires additional skills differing from face-to-face learning, and since online learning is often self-paced, an absence of these skills will make a student’s learning experience difficult. These skills include:
- Time management (i.e. effectively managing deadlines, schedules)
- Organization (i.e. creating a dedicated study space, ability to easily access material)
- Self-motivation (i.e. scheduling set times for coursework, peer study accountability)
- Self-regulation (i.e. strategies can include breaks, physical activity, meditation)
- Strong written and oral communication (i.e. technical writing skills, ability to communicate with others and ask for assistance if needed) (Crozier & Lake, 2020)
Here are a couple more ways you can hone your online learning skills:
Active Participation: Actively engage in online discussions, forums, and virtual class sessions to enhance your understanding and connect with peers.
Regular Communication with Instructors: Establish clear lines of communication with instructors, seeking clarification when needed and participating in office hours or virtual meetings.
Utilize Online Resources: Take advantage of digital resources provided by the university, including online libraries, research databases, and academic support services.
Tech Preparedness: Ensure your computer and internet connection are reliable, and familiarize yourself with the required software tools for the course.
Active Reading and Note-Taking: Develop effective reading strategies and take concise notes to enhance comprehension and retain key information.
Collaborate with Peers: Foster virtual collaboration with classmates through group projects, study groups, and peer discussions to enrich your learning experience.
Regular Self-Assessment: Reflect on your progress regularly, assess your understanding of the material, and adjust your study strategies accordingly.
Remember, flexibility and adaptability are key in the online learning environment. Tailor these tips to your individual needs and the specific requirements of your courses. Note also that you will have opportunities to practice these skills throughout the course.
Here is some additional advice from TWU students. Watch Learning Online: Student Tips for Success.
Activity: Learning Online Effectively
There are thousands of websites that offer ‘Tips for online learning’, or ‘How to succeed in your online class’ advice, and some of those sites are good (see here, here, here, and here ). Some of them are also connected to shady people who want less than your best interests. One of the shining examples of a great resource is the Liberated Learner project, which was created primarily by Ontario university and college students like you. There are four main sections in the Liberated Learner resource, and we will explore ‘The Learner’ in this activity.
Take some time to work through The Learner. There are activities that you can complete, and they are for your reflections.
Questions to Consider
Having worked through The Learner, consider the ideas you think would be most beneficial for your online studies. To record your thoughts, you could create a list of your Top Ten Study Tips for Online Learning, or maybe write a message to a friend or sibling who is considering attending TWU next year. Following this, reflect on how you can work to ensure your own success in your online courses. What are your goals, and what specific steps will you take to achieve them?
Activity: Online Discussions
Participating in discussions with your peers, what higher education folks like to call discourse (a verb), is an essential aspect of effective online courses, facilitated through platforms such as Moodle discussion forums, WordPress blogs, Discourse (a noun referring to the app called Discourse) posts, and others. We all know that discussion forums can sometimes be tedious, especially when they are assessed the same way a formal paper is assessed. However, the benefits of using asynchronous technologies (where your interactions with others are time-delayed) in well-designed activities can be significant.
Here is an article, by Galikyan and Admiraal (2019), for you to read that will introduce you to some key ideas about discussion forums.
Galikyan, I., & Admiraal, W. (2019). Students’ engagement in asynchronous online discussion: The relationship between cognitive presence, learner prominence, and academic performance. The Internet and Higher Education, 43, 100692.
Note: You may need to sign in to the TWU library to access this article. You can find help here.
Write while you read!
- first of all, don’t get too bogged down in the ‘Method’ section of this article, but carefully read sections 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and the Appendix.
- while you read, jot down some notes, either in a notebook on paper, or in a file on your computer.
- once you are done, write a 2-3 sentence summary in your own words of the article and how it relates to you and your experience.
- do not hesitate to look up words that you don’t understand, and include the definitions in your notes.
- include at least one question that you have about the article in your notes.
Discussion Guidelines for LDRS 101
In this course, we will ask you to discuss ideas with your peers via Discourse, WordPress and other social media platforms. These discussions are ungraded and are an important part of your assignments in this course. Consider for example, two course learning outcomes that relate to online discussions:
- Develop personal and professional learning networks to discover and share knowledge, collaborate with others, and become engaged digital global citizens.
- Create inclusive digital communities which embody a sense of belonging, connection, and Christian hospitality.
Your discussion posts may be used as learning artifacts to demonstrate your understanding of the course learning outcomes (see Assignment details in Moodle).
In LDRS 101, you should write your posts in a way that shows you are communicating in an academic setting. While you don’t need to adhere to all of the conventions of APA formatting, you should practice the principles of proper citation. For example, if I wanted to cite an idea from the article in the previous activity, it would look like the following (Galikyan & Admiraal, 2019), and at the bottom of the post, I would include a ‘References’ heading, followed by the full reference (this part may be considered optional since we have included a link to the article in the in-text citation, but it is nice to have). Please consult the APAStyle website for the essentials.
It is highly recommended1 that you begin using a reference manager, and we recommend Zotero as it is a free and open source app with all you will ever need to cite properly in any style. We will lead you through some specifics of using Zotero in the next unit of LDRS 101, but if you want to get started, you can download Zotero for free.
In short, similar to a live classroom discussion, you need to be polite and professional, and you need to provide evidence for your views, but, like in a normal conversation, you won’t have all of the formalities of academic writing. In LDRS 101, you should consider your forum posts as a time to practice and test your ideas. The stakes are very low, so it is fine to make mistakes.
In online discussion forums, learners are encouraged to respond substantively. What does this mean?
Substantive responses may include:
- Providing a new thought, idea, or perspective;
- Citing an experience or example of what we are learning;
- Adding a new twist on a perspective;
- Critically thinking about an idea/concept;
- Questioning or challenging a principle/perspective;
- Asking a question or making a comment that shows you are interested in what another person says or encourages another person to elaborate on something they have already said;
- Sharing a resource (a reading, web link, video) not covered in the syllabus that adds new information or perspectives to our learning;
- Making a comment that underscores the link between two people’s contributions and making this link explicit in your comment. Or making a summary observation that takes into account several people’s contributions and that touches on a recurring theme in the discussion.
What Substantive Participation is NOT:
- Very basic comments such as “I agree” or “I disagree;”
- Restating what has been said (unless there is a direct purpose in doing so);
- Disrespectfully disagreeing;
- Pat answers that are not thought-provoking or do not move the dialogue forward;
Below are examples of how to stimulate your own and others’ thinking:
- What would happen if…
- Other times it may be helpful to…
- It is my understanding…what is your experience with this?
- You might approach this from…
- Is it possible that…
- Would you consider…
- Maybe…
- Possibly…
- Sometimes…
- I’m wondering if…
- Do you think…
For more on substantive participation, read Writing A Substantive Discussion Post for An Online Class Forum.
Activity: Start a Conversation!
Head over to the Learning Hub on Discourse and find the Leadership 101 category. Start a conversation about one of the following (or something else relevant):
- something that has interested you about learning online.
- your goals for your academic studies.
- How will you stay motivated in this course?
- What digital literacy skills do you hope to gain, and how will those benefit you in your academic and professional career?
- a ‘Wow’ and a ‘Wonder’ about online learning.
Understanding the Digital
Our next topic is an introduction to the idea of the digital. You may recognize that digital tools are deeply embedded in modern society. It is not uncommon for people of all ages to interact with apps and tools that claim to connect people in conversations or networks, or to perform complex tasks for work, or to control various systems in our vehicles. Digital technology is really everywhere we look. Thinking about these tools is one way to conceptualize how we interact with digital tools, but we can also recognize that our social practices and norms have been impacted by digital tools. An example of this, at least in North America, is that the names of companies have become verbs. If people want to learn something about a topic, they Google it. Mobile phones are often essential tools for communication, social media, internet browsing, messaging, entertainment, photography, navigation, online shopping, mobile banking, productivity, two-factor authentication for some websites, and health and fitness management. In other cases, such as in social media, it is almost impossible to participate in public discourse without access to technology.
Modern universities are also deeply impacted by the digital. Every system involved in higher education has been digitized in some manner, including recruitment, accounting, and fundraising. As you begin your university career, here are some digital systems you will likely encounter:
- courses are designed and often delivered digitally,
- course logistics (discussion forums, assignment submissions, quizzes, gradebooks) happen in large digital tools called learning management systems (LMS) or virtual learning environments (VLE) (e.g. Moodle),
- assignments must often be created digitally (word processors, presentation software, video editors, website builders),
- research data is gathered, stored, analyzed, and shared digitally.
There are many other processes and procedures that rely on the digital in higher education, but the important thing for you to realize as you begin your higher education journey is that there are many tools that you will be required to learn and use throughout your journey. Some are more obvious, like word processors, presentation software, email, the library website, and LMSs, but some are less obvious and won’t necessarily be taught specifically, other than in this course.
Some of the digital tools we will introduce to you will help you build a workflow for you to manage the huge amount of information and resources that you will have to sort through to complete many of your assignments. You will learn to use AI to find relevant resources on whatever your topic might be. As you know from searching Google, a simple search of the web can turn up thousands or millions of hits, but there are tools that can help you highlight the 20 most relevant resources in just a few clicks. Once you find resources, we will show you tools that will allow you to track all your references, create citations in your writing quickly and easily, and then create a perfectly formatted reference list. Do not waste your time creating your own bibliographies! This one tool will save you days and likely weeks of work during your degree (quite literally). We will show you another tool that will allow you to make connections between ideas and notes so that you build a network of connected ideas. Curating this network of ideas is possibly one of the most useful things you can do in higher ed. You will end up with a searchable network of everything you’ve learned, and be able to visualize it at the click of a button. We will help you think through the implications of how you present yourself on the web so that you can make wise decisions about what you share and how you share it. We will also help you make connections on the web that could become a key resource for your learning and working in your career.
Digital Literacies
Digital literacy is a person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities for using digital tools ethically, effectively, and within a variety of contexts in order to access, interpret, and evaluate information, as well as to create, construct new knowledge, and communicate with others. From B.C.’s Post-Secondary Digital Learning Strategy
Literacy, as we commonly understand it, is the ability to understand the meaning of texts. It is more than just being able to ‘read’. In the same way, digital literacy is the ability to make meaning using digital tools. It is more than simply being able to post to Instagram or TikTok, or whatever app you might use. As the definition above indicates, digital literacy involves using tools ethically, to access, interpret, evaluate, create, construct, and communicate information and knowledge.
“In today’s world, being literate requires much, much more than the traditional literacy of yesterday.” —Rebecca Alber
What digital tools do you use to help you make meaning? What is your “go-to” app for note-taking, organizing files, tracking references, and connecting ideas? One valuable tool we are going to show you is called Obsidian, a free note-taking and mind-mapping app. Before you go through the instructions in the activity below, watch the following video This is Obsidian.
Activity: Getting Started with Obsidian
Follow the steps below to install Obsidian on your computer.
- Go to obsidian.md and follow these instructions to install Obsidian on your computer.
- It is recommended that you use a computer, rather than a mobile phone to install Obsidian, but please let your instructor or facilitator know if you are on mobile.
- You do NOT need to purchase any upgrades such as Obsidian Sync or Obsidian Publish.
- Work through the Getting Started section of the Obsidian help pages starting with Create a vault.
- When you create the vault in this step, we recommend that you name it TWU or something similar. Later, you can create as many vaults as you would like.
- It is recommended that you use one of the sync services listed here so that your files are backed up.
If you are having any difficulty in installing Obsidian, feel free to reach out for support on the Learning Hub. There are also several tutorials and videos online, so you are encouraged to seek out these resources. One example is Obsidian for Beginners: Start HERE — How to Use the Obsidian App for Notes. The first minute shows how to set up Obsidian…and if you’d like a sneak peek at the amazing features this tool has to offer, watch on! We’ll get to these additional uses of Obsidian later in the course.
Obsidian will become a backbone of this course as we will use it to learn how the web works and give you a workflow that will help you stay organized. One of the advantages of Obsidian is that everything you do in the app happens on your own computer, rather than the cloud, which is just another way of saying someone else’s computer. However, the drawback to that is that you need to ensure that you have a backup of your vaults in a secure location, either one of the sync services mentioned in step 3, above, or another backup system. Please check the Learning Hub or talk your your instructor or facilitator for help with this.
Activity: Download the Starter Vault
To give you a head start, we have created a starter vault for you to download and use. Follow the instructions below to access the starter vault.
- Click this link to download the vault.
- This will download a file called
ldrs101-vault-main.zipto your computer. - The
.zipextension means that this is a compressed file and it contains multiple other files inside.
- This will download a file called
- Move the compressed file to your
Documentsfolder. - Unzip or extract the contents of the file. You should see a list of files similar to the image below.
- Rename the folder to
ldrs101-[firstname-lastname](use all lowercase letters and a dash instead of spaces). - Open the Obsidian app and click the
Open another vaulticon in the bottom left corner.
- Choose the
ldrs101-[firstame-lastname]folder, and then Obsidian will ask you to trust this vault. Click ‘Trust author and enable plugins’. - Once you are in the vault, feel free to take a look around. You will notice a
HOMEpage, aToolsfolder with some files in it, and aVR Diagram Canvas.
Now that you have a place to record your course notes, let’s jump back into the discussion about digital literacy. Traditionally, literacy was about speaking, listening, reading and writing. Literacy has taken on a much broader and complex meaning. Today there’s also digital literacy, media literacy, new literacy etc. In the activity below you are invited to reflect on how your literacies have changed, when compared to your parents and to speculate on new literacies the next generation of learners may need for the future.
Activity: Reflection on the 21st Century Learner
The following video, published by the MacArthur Foundation, questions how digital media are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. John Seely Brown a researcher with particular interests in radical innovation and digital culture suggests that today’s gaming oriented children want to be measured and feel that if they are not learning, it is not fun. How does this relate to how you feel about learning?
Watch the video and think about:
- What “literacy” skills have you acquired when compared to your parents?
- What “literacy” skills will be important for future learners in higher education?
Reflect on the following writing prompts:
- My parents did not need to …
- A new literacy I acquired is the ability to …
- Higher education students of the future will need to …
- … is an important 21st century skill for future employment
To complete this activity, click ‘Open Today’s Daily Note’ in your Obsidian vault and write your reflections.
- Style your text using Markdown codes. Click here for the basic Markdown syntax.
- Feel free to add images and other media!
- Please make sure you add tags to your note. Suggested tags might be #digital-literacy #ldrs101 #macarthur-foundation #john-seely-brown.
Notice that tags start with a hashtag and contain no spaces. Separate words with a hyphen.
Let’s dive a little deeper into this topic of digital literacy. What is it? How would you define digital literacy?
In the next activity, you will start to unpack this term and prepare your own initial definition of digital literacy.
Activity: Definining Digital Literacy
Let’s take a look at the definitions of digital literacy and digital skills on the web and identify the difference. Follow the steps below and feel free to jot down some notes in your Obsidian journal. If you are completing this activity on a new day, create a new daily note.
- Read Wikipedia’s definition of Digital literacy – Is this a good description?
- Scan the #diglit hashtag on X (Twitter) – Did you find any valuable links to defining digital literacy?
- Conduct a Google search for “digital literacy.” Select a few definitions you like and record the urls, for example by adding these to your browser bookmarks.
- Conduct a Google search for “digital skills.” Select one or two definitions you like and record the urls.
- Conduct a Google search for “digital fluency” Select one or two definitions.
- What are the differences between digital literacies, digital fluency, and digital skills? How are these concepts related?
- Read: What is digital literacy? published by POMO – Is this a reliable source?
- How would you rate the academic quality of the definitions you found (e.g. low / high quality)?
- What did you discover?
Share your thoughts and experiences by posting on the LDRS 101 Discourse chat. For example:
- The major difference between digital skills and literacies is …
- I didn’t realise that …
- For me, digital literacy means …”
Digital Literacies & Skills
Digital literacies for academic learning involves more than Facebook, Snapchat or X (Twitter) and the associated technical skills in using these technologies.
As you explore the concept, you will find online resources which confuse digital skills with digital literacies. The activities which follow aim to provide an initial introduction to the wide range of digital literacies associated with academic learning. We will explore the concept of digital literacies in greater depth as we progress with the course. When exploring these online resources, we encourage you to differentiate between skills and literacies and to develop a critical disposition. Digtial literacies involve issues, norms, and habits of mind surrounding technologies used for a particular purpose. However, these literacies are closely related to technical proficiency in using a range of digital applications.
Activity: What Are Digital Literacies?
Watch educator and researcher Doug Belsahw as he discusses his digital literacies framework: The essential elements of digital literacies
Next, read Quick guide - Developing students’ digital literacy
The JISC guide defines digital literacies as “those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society”. Furthermore, this report distinguishes between seven types of digital literacies:
Do you agree that these are the key literacies you need to live, learn and work in today’s society? What would you add?
Conduct a quick Google search for “digital literacies” and throw in terms such as “essential”, “top”, “21st century”. What other literacies or skills are emphasized? What would your list be for digital literacies that are important for you?
Activity: Why Digital Literacy Matters
A key component of digital literacy and networked learning relates to the ability to engage meaningfully in online learning communities.
This learning activity will provide you with another opportunity to connect with your peers in Discourse and contribute to online learning discussions.
Watch the following video and jot down the reasons why digital literacy matters to you, then complete the steps which follow.
Watch: Digital literacy and why it matters
Next, go to the LDRS 101 section in Discourse. Post a contribution to the discussion on digital literacies and why they are important for you. Try to post one or two replies to interesting contributions. (You should also “like” good contributions, use the person’s username when replying, and if appropriate quote a reply when responding.)
Activity: Am I Digitally Literate?
Digital literacies encompasses a wide range of capabilities which extend beyond the digital skills associated with different technologies.
- Consider the digital literacies you identified from the previous activity.
- Jot down one or more technologies or tools you would recommend for each of the skills and assess your competence in using each particular technology/tool (e.g. below average, average, above average and excellent).
- Next, use your searching skills to discover online tests for assessing your digital literacies (Don’t spend more than 15 to 20 minutes on the self-assessment activity).
- Conduct a Google search using: “digital literacy self-assessment”
- Choose a link to conduct a self-assessment of your digital literacy.
- Conduct a Google search using: “digital literacy self-assessment”
Alternatively, you can choose from these resources:
- Take the Digital Literacy Self-Assessment from the Canadian Association for Supported Employment or
- Use the Digital Literacy Self-Assessment Tool from the Digital Literacy Guide. - Explore the What is digital literacy? page of the Digital Literacies Toolkit developed by the University of Southampton.
Questions to Consider
- Did the self-assessment you chose focus on digital skills or digital literacies?
- What did you learn from this exercise?
- Share your thoughts by posting on Discourse:
Visitors and Residents
One way to start thinking about digital literacy is to create a map of the apps and tools that you use, how you use them, and what traces of your presence you leave behind on the web. We call this a Visitors and Residents Diagram. To complete this activity, we’ll first discuss some key concepts.
Have you encountered the terms ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’? What are your initial thoughts on their definitions?
Note: Marc Prensky coined the terms ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’. We recognize that the term ‘native’ should not be used to talk about people.
The essential argument is that certain generations have changed in that they have this innate ability to use and learn technology because they have grown up using technology, and those generations whose formative years pre-date the advent of the internet are forever at a disadvantage compared to kids. You can read a bit more about the idea on Wikipedia, linked below. There is also a link in that article to Prensky’s original article.
Aside from the problematic framing of learners as kids, there are some distinct challenges with the idea of digital literacy being a fixed trait rather than a matter of comfort, familiarity, and a skill that can be practiced and learned. It is no secret that more young people are comfortable using social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat, Weibo, WeChat, and the like, but this doesn’t imply a superior aptitude for learning technology compared to older generations or an inherent proficiency in doing so. For example, are most 1st-year university students proficient in using a spreadsheet to create a budget? If they have created a budget, it’s more likely they use an app than a spreadsheet.
We’d like to introduce you to a different way to conceptualize your relationship with digital media, and that is that you may be a visitor in some web spaces and a resident in others. Places on the web where you might be a visitor are those places where you, quite literally, visit, but importantly, don’t leave a public trace of your time there. You don’t spend any time interacting with people, but rather, you take a rather utilitarian approach by visiting a site, doing a thing, and leaving.
Alternately, there are places and spaces on the web, where you reside as a persona, where you interact, socialize, and leave traces of yourself online. For some, that may be Facebook, where you keep in touch with friends and family, or X (formerly Twitter), or maybe it’s a blog, or social site. The important distinction is that these are places where you connect with other people; where you are socially present.
At the same time, if we can imagine the visitor \(\leftrightarrow\) resident continuum on a horizontal axis, there is also a personal \(\updownarrow\) professional (or educational) continuum on a vertical axis, leading to 4 quadrants where you might situate your technology use.
Activity: Where Am I Online?
The video below explains a process to help you think about where you reside on the web (7 mins).
Questions to Consider
- What surprised you as you watched the video?
- How can you apply the concepts presented to your experience in learning with technology?
Feel free to jot down your notes in Obsidian.
Now to the task of creating your own Visitors and Residents Diagram.
See the VR Diagram below…keep in mind that this diagram represents a set of tools that I have been using for a decade or more and that I have invested my career in educational technology. There is a lot here, but yours might look significantly different with only a few tools here and there. Or perhaps your VR diagram has a plethora of tools you use regularly. The key idea of visitors and residents is for you to think about which technologies you use as a resident, and then to think about which tools you may have tried or are interested in pursuing. From there, we can begin to plan for tools we can use that afford us the opportunity to reside there.
It is certainly notable that I am very much a visitor in Moodle! This does not mean that I don’t spend much time there, I spend a significant portion of every day working in Moodle, rather, the work that I do there leaves very little trace of my personality. You will (hopefully) see Moodle as much more of a place where you reside. But this foregrounds the question of whether Moodle is actually designed to promote residencies. Certainly the forums allow for users to project their persona into the system, as do a few of the other features, but the system itself is very heavily templated. There are profiles that can be edited, but users are limited to one very tiny image and virtually no opportunity to determine for themselves what they want to share. There is little room for customization, and every time a course ends, every single user must recreate their persona in a new course site (or five).
For many university students, a Learning Management System (LMS) like Moodle is a perfectly reasonable place to reside and they feel comfortable accessing course materials, finding their grades, communicating with classmates, etc. And just like our physical homes, the quality of the community that lives there isn’t determined by the features of the house itself, but by the people who share the space and how they structure their time and interactions.
Activity: Visitor and Resident Diagram
I hope this activity will help you think about how the tools we use shape and sometimes determine the nature of our interactions with each other. Do the tools you use fall on the visitor or the resident end of your continuum? How do these tools impact your learning?
- Read Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement
- Create a new ‘Canvas’ in your Obsidian vault and create your own Visitor/Resident map. We have created a sample VR Diagram in the vault.
Note
This VR diagram can be used to demonstrate your understanding of the course learning outcomes. See the Assessment tab in Moodle for how this activity relates to the assessments in this course.
Digital Privacy & Safety
Now that you have assessed some of your digital skills or literacies, let’s focus our attention on privacy and safety. In this section we summarize important practices as a reminder to remain vigilant in protecting your privacy and security online. If you are unsure about good security practices, there are a wealth of online resources you can (and should) consult.
Privacy
Your privacy is fragile, easy to lose instantaneously, and difficult to retrieve in an environment that requires so much online interaction.
- Identity theft happens, frequently.
- Never put your social security number, your birthday, your mother’s maiden name, or any other personal facts, anywhere online. Everyone on the Internet will be able to access this information.
- Always assume that anything you write online (including email) can, and probably will, eventually leak. Keep your email address private – to avoid receiving spam. If your email is published in a plain form anywhere online, even if it is part of an archived email list, spammers will “harvest” it for their databases.
- Never put your social security number, your birthday, your mother’s maiden name, or any other personal facts, anywhere online. Everyone on the Internet will be able to access this information.
- Spam email (at least half of all email being sent) – is an unfortunate fact of our modern lives.
- If you must publish your email address online, consider creating a “sacrificial” email address, or one you only use to publish online. You can create an email “alias,” which you can set to automatically forward to your primary email, and easily disable if your spam volumes increases. Many email services will automatically generate random email addresses that you can use to hide your true address.
- Another approach is to avoid publishing the email address as something like myname@somewebdomain.net… Instead you might use more confusing text, such as myname-at-somewebdomain-net. Some websites support using these types of obfuscation methods, but the spammers who “scrape” email addresses from websites to populate their spam databases use increasingly sophisticated methods to defeat these methods.
- Basically, avoid publishing the email addresses you value online to decrease the amount of spam you receive.
Passwords
What about passwords? Many people have just one, or maybe a few. Given the number of websites and web services which require password-based authentication, this is not good enough to avoid an identity disaster.
The problem with having only a few passwords is that even resource-rich and security-critical organizations have suffered massive leaks. If even one of them suffers a data leak, identity thieves will obtain your password and try to use it on other websites. It is easy for them to do this using computer technologies.
Other ways someone can get your password include:
- Sniffing traffic when you log into a non-secure website that uses http:// rather than https:// – the “s” stands for secure because your data transmission’s encrypted. Look for the Lock icon.png in your address bar.
- Sniffing emails – your email, unless encrypted, is not secure. Never send a login and password along with the web address of a service (similarly, don’t send credit card numbers).
- Phishing attacks – where someone sends you an email that looks like it is from a trusted sender, such as from a friend, your bank, an online store you frequent, or a government agency, and they ask you to enter your password to confirm it. No one should ever ask you to enter your password via email.
- Always check the web address (hover over the link) to make sure it corresponds to the right place, or call the sender to confirm the request over the phone.
- Brute force – hackers often use computers to guess your password, beginning with a list of common passwords, and try different combinations until they get it right, or until the system locks them out for trying too many times.
- “How secure is my password” sites – you should avoid these sites and never type your password into a website or email response that is not appropriate, especially when you know the sender also knows your email.
- Once your email and any password combination are known, identity thieves will try to use them at various websites, because they know most people only use a few passwords. A thief who discovers a password you created for a website you rarely use will try to compromise the security of a website that is important to you – such as your email system, your workplace, social media accounts, or bank account.
Here is a table that shows how quickly passwords can be cracked using brute force methods. Note that the best passwords are both long and include a mix of numbers, lower-case and upper-case letters, and symbols.
There are services you can use to check if your email is part of a leaked password data set. So, what can you do to protect yourself?
Password Managers
Get a password manager. They are incredibly helpful and convenient now that many of us use several computers and mobile devices. Password managers help you manage your passwords.
- When you choose a password manager, make sure you create one strong password, such as a full sentence with some numbers and special characters. This is all you need to remember – the password manager remembers the others. The ensures you generate a different, fully-random password for each website you use that requires a password.
- Good password managers only ever store your details in an encrypted form, where even the company that stores it cannot see your passwords. To access your passwords, you log into the password manager service using your single, strong password (via a secure web link – usually the default, but always check!).
- There are many password manager options. Some widely used proprietary options include Lastpass and 1password. Open source options also exist, such as Bitwarden. Sadly, some of the most popular password managers have suffered from software bugs that have exposed user passwords.
Activity: Get a Password Manager
If you don’t already use a password manager, set up an account with Lastpass, 1password, or the free password manager, Bitwarden to familiarize yourself with how password managers work.
- Read the instructions in the article: “How to Start Using a Password Manager” published by Makeuseof.com
- Create an account on the password manager site and establish a Master Password. (Conduct an online search for advice on choosing a secure Master Password.)
- Install the browser extension for your local browser.
- Choose one of the TWU course websites and set up a new secure password using your password manager.
- Log out of the TWU course website, and log in again using the password manager.
- Install the mobile phone app for your operating system, and/or desktop application for your computer (optional). Synchronize the local app with your online vault.
- Consider using the Password manager for your online accounts so you can easily set up and maintain a unique password for each online account you use.
Good Messaging Hygiene
Always assume that anyone can and will read anything you write in an email. Email is not a secure form of communication. Few people encrypt their email, because it is an extra step that even the most technically-inclined users are reluctant to take. Both sender and recipient have to be technically proficient.
Text messages and instant messaging, such as Facebook messenger, are also insecure. Anyone, including government officials and the organization that runs the service, such as Facebook employees, can read it.
Secure your Own Privacy
Never send any sensitive data, such as your social security number, credit card number, password, or other personal information via email or text. Call the person to provide this information over the phone.
You can use a secure, encrypted, text message service, such as Signal if necessary. It is available at no cost, works on most platforms, and encrypts text messages on your phone. If you text someone else with Signal installed, the entire transaction is encrypted.
Secure the Privacy of Others
Another element of good digital hygiene is to protect the identity of others. For example, never send group emails using To: or CC: (carbon copy) for each email address. You will reveal the email addresses for everyone on your list. This is especially problematic if you or another person saves the email message and displays it on the web, such as in a mailing list archive. This makes it easy for spammers and hackers to access and download all of those email addresses.
Use BCC: (blind carbon copy), to hide the email addresses from your recipients, to protect everyone’s privacy. Use your own email address, and BCC the rest of the recipients, if your email software requires you to insert an email address into the To: box.
When using an email mailing list, where you send messages to a single email address to a list of people, never CC: someone else in the same message. This will compromise the privacy of every CC’d recipient and the privacy of the list. Always check with the people on the list to ensure you are not taking unacceptable liberties.
If someone asks you to share an email address of a friend or colleague, you should ask permission to share their email address, and state why the third party is requesting their email.
Be a Thoughtful Sceptic
So how can we protect ourselves if new threats are emerging all the time?
- Be conscious of where you put information that is “private” to you.
- Beware of the terms of service of social media providers, such as Facebook. Use a service like “TOSDR” to help identify risky, overreaching services. You may be able to use certain privacy settings to protect your information.
- Always check the identity of a website before you enter any passwords or personal information. Secure certificates are generally trustworthy, but be sure check the names and details.
- Always ask whether you should trust a provider or a government agency. Always ask “who benefits when I do this?” What are their incentives?
- Protect your own data and be even more protective of others’ private information. For example, be cautious before posting information about yourself or someone else. Be especially cautious when posting pictures or videos of their children.
- Remember, complacency and unwarranted trust are your biggest enemies. A healthy paranoia is good for your digital health. Think about the great amount of time and effort it will take to regain your identity (and credit rating) if your information is compromised.
Activity: ToS Analysis
Use the Terms of Service: Didn’t Read site to look up each of the apps we will learn in this course. Each tool currently has it’s own file in your Obsidian vault with a template ready to go for you. Fill out the template for each tool based on what is available on tosdr.org and your own exampination of the ToS for each tool.
Feel free to add components to the template.
Activity: Introduction to the Reflective Journaling
For the final activity of Unit 1 you will be asked to write a reflective journal entry in Obsidian on the topic of Digital Literacy. This entry can be used as part of Assignment 1: Learning Journal.
Prior to completing this activity, let’s discuss the practice of writing in a Reflective Journal.
A reflective journal is simply a record of your thoughts. It is a reflection of the way you think and the manner in which you respond to your learning. Journals can consist of traditional note taking, mind maps, pictures, stream-of-consciousness writing, recordings, quotes, sketches, or drawings: whatever you choose to include. Experiment and have fun. The purpose of journaling is to make you an active participant in your learning experiences as you engage in the various activities throughout the course’s readings, activities, and discussions. Reflecting upon these learning events will help you gain a deeper understanding of the course materials and help integrate your learning into applied practice in your everyday life and work. Throughout the course, we will remind you to write in your journal, as we want to be sure you are actively learning the material. To assist you, we have provided you with questions you can ask yourself in order to get your creative energies flowing. Reflective journaling is an activity you can and should complete on a regular or daily basis, even beyond the prompting in course activities.
Watch the following video on how to write reflectively: Reflective Writing
As you continue your studies with TWU, you will likely be asked to write in a Reflective Journal, or submit a Reflective Essay. Here are some common questions used for Reflective Journaling. As you read them, consider what you have learned in this first unit.
- In your view, what were the most important points in the readings or activities?
- What information did you already know? What skills did you already have?
- What new knowledge, skills, or perspectives have you gained?
- What information was easy to remember or learn? Why?
- What concepts or skills did you find more difficult? Why?
- How can you apply this knowledge to your studies or future career?
- How has this knowledge helped you to make sense of your current or previous experience?
- Has your understanding of a personal or work-related situation changed after studying these concepts?
- Did you agree or disagree with any of the material? If yes, how did you react and why?
- If you could have the opportunity to engage in further learning, what would it be?
- What further questions would like to ask about the concepts presented in this unit?
- What other concepts, resources or discussions would be of interest?
Activity: Digital Literacies for Online Learning
In this activity you are asked to write a reflective journal entry on the topic of Digital Literacy.
First, let’s get you set up in Obsidian.
Click the little calendar icon in the sidebar of Obsidian to ‘Open today’s daily note’.
Next, respond to the following prompts:
- Your personal definition of digital literacies justified from your reading of the literature (about 100 to 150 words)
- Describe what digital literacies mean for you in a sentence.
- Create a link to your VR diagram map in your entry.
- Summarise an action plan for improving your digital literacies. Identify the literacies you plan to improve including the reasons why and how you aim to achieve this.
- Ensure that your references are cited appropriately.
Note
This journal entry can be used to demonstrate your understanding of the course learning outcomes. See the Assessment tab in Moodle for how this activity relates to the assessments in this course.
Summary
In this first unit, you have had the opportunity to learn about some of the impacts of the digital on your life. You have started to build an academic knowledge management workflow, a pivotal skill essential for efficiently organizing, accessing, and leveraging information. Throughout the unit, you’ve actively engaged with the digital tools, shared insights into your personal interactions with digital technology, and begun applying these tools to enhance your academic learning experience. Furthermore, you’ve developed a personalized understanding of digital literacy and explored how to protect yourself and others in digital and online contexts. As you progress through the course, take a moment to identify the specific literacies you aspire to refine and articulate the concrete steps you intend to take in pursuit of these goals.
Assessment
Assignment 1: Learning Journal
The learning activities in this unit are designed to support you as you build your Learning Journal (Assignment 1). Please see the Assessment section in Moodle for details on this assignment. Note the activities also relate to your Digital Literacy Portfolio (Assignment 3), so be intentional about completing each activity in this unit to support the learning artifact you will present in these assignments.
All assignment details, including the grading rubrics, are located in the Assessment section in Moodle. Please read the instructions carefully and don’t hestitate to reach out for support.
Checking your Learning
Before you move on to the next unit, check that you are able to:
- Explore common digital tools used at Trinity Western University
- Describe your engagement with digital technology
- Apply digital tools to support learning in an academic environment
- Explain what digital literacy means to you
- Examine privacy concerns related to various platforms and tools
- Describe how to protect yourself and others in the digital environment.
- Identify the literacies you plan to improve and what steps you will take to achieve your goals.
Discovering and Curating Resources
Overview
In this module, we’ll dive into three important aspects of utilizing digital resources effectively. Firstly, we’ll explore the art of discovering and selecting valuable resources for your academic and professional needs. You’ll learn how to search efficiently, critically assess sources for credibility and relevance, and fine-tune your search techniques.
Next, we’ll delve into the world of citation management. Properly citing your sources is vital in academic writing to avoid plagiarism, and we’ll introduce you to various citation styles like APA, MLA, and Chicago. You’ll also gain practical experience with citation management tools to help streamline the citation process and manage your references efficiently.
Finally, we’ll discuss the concept of openness in education. We’ll explore open educational resources (OER), the benefits and challenges of open access, and the role of Creative Commons licenses in educational materials. This discussion will open your eyes to the changing landscape of educational resources and the ethics surrounding them. Throughout these topics, you’ll engage in hands-on activities, group projects, and discussions to enhance your critical thinking skills and promote responsible use of digital resources.
Topics
This unit is divided into the following topics:
- Finding & Selecting Resources
- Evaluating Resources
- Citation Management
- Openness in Education
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit, you should have made progress toward the following course outcomes:
- Develop effective search strategies to locate scholarly resources using various academic databases and online repositories.
- Apply strategies to assess, analyse, and evaluate the reliability of resources, including reporting in the mass media.
- Utilize citation management tools effectively to organize references, generate bibliographies, and streamline the citation process.
- Describe the principles of openness in education, including open educational resources (OER) and open access.
- Build and customize technology-integrated workflows to enhance and enrich your learning journey.
- Apply digital literacy skills to evaluate the legitimacy, credibility and reliability of online resources for academic study.
Activity Checklist
Here is a checklist of learning activities you will benefit from in completing this unit. You may find it useful for planning your work.
Learning Activities
- Explore Litmaps to find articles of interest.
- Visit the TWU Library and view the libguides.
- Practice using the Google advanced search operators to help you search for resources.
- Search open databases (BASE & DOAJ) to find open academic resources.
- Use the CRAAP Test to help evaluate resources.
- Discuss the reasons you should or should not use Wikipedia, and for what purposes.
- Download and Install Zotero and explore how you can use this tool.
- Explore Open Educational Resources and reflect on how you might advocate for OER.
Notes: - You will be directed to complete these activities as they come up in the unit.
- The learning activities in this course are designed to prepare you for the graded assigments in this course. You are strongly encouraged to complete them. - If you plan to complete this course in 12 weeks, this unit should take 9-12 hours to complete.
Assessment
- See the Assessment section in Moodle for assignment details and due dates.
Resources
- All resources will be provided online in the unit.
Finding and Selecting Resources
Throughout your university career, you will encounter tasks in your courses that will require you to produce some original writing. It is very important that you give yourself more time than you think you might need to complete these tasks. Good writing in university doesn’t just happen. It takes work. You will find that a large amount of that work isn’t actually writing at all, but reading. Then writing, and reading some more. Then re-writing, revising, editing, reading some more, and editing again.
One of the most important tasks in all that, is finding the resources you need to read, making sure they are academic resources, copying down all the information about the resource, then making sure you can keep track of what you have found, read, and learned. This unit will help you build a workflow for doing just that. You need a workflow and a system, because there is far too much information available to you than you will ever be able to digest and read, let alone remember. It is impossible to memorize everything you need to know, so you need a way to manage your knowledge and resources.
In the previous unit, we introduced you to Obsidian, and you are going to continue to use Obsidian in this unit, but we will add some awareness of features that will take you along the path of becoming a workflow wizard. We will also introduce two new tools, Litmaps and Zotero, along with a couple of Zotero plugins that help extend the capabilities of the software. We will also integrate some knowledge of how to use the library to assist.
We recognize that we are introducing several tools to you, and that may feel overwhelming, however, there are no tools that do everything that you need to do, and if a tool claims to be able to do everything, it likely does only a few things well, and the rest is poorly implemented.
Finding Resources
Litmaps is a web app that you can use to build a map of the literature regarding your topic. For now, presume that you need to write a paper on transformational servant leadership. That is a very broad topic, and you are only beginning to learn about it, so you need to start by doing some reading…but what should you read? Your instructor might have given you an article to read, or there are likely some good articles published on your course syllabus, but you might also have to start on your own. Here is how.
Find a Literature Review
When academics begin writing a research paper, they always start by reviewing what is already known about a subject, in this case, transformational servant leadership. This is called a literature review, and you can often find a section called “Literature Review” at the beginning of every article you read. Sometimes, though, the whole research article will be a literature review. Reviewing the literature in this way is sometimes called a systematic review, or maybe a scoping review. These approaches to lit reviews have different foci, but the intent is to publish an article that follows very specific procedures so that other researchers or learners can confirm the process. These types of reviews are very useful in getting started in a new topic.
One of the quickest ways to get started on a search is to use Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), but Google Scholar has some problems in that it will return a huge number of results. Notice that the image below shows over 91,000 results. Far too many for you to sort through.
The top result, shows some promise though. Notice a few things about it.
- it has all your key words right in the title - that’s good
- it has over 2700 citations (that’s very good)
- it was published in 2004 (that’s not great…it’s old)
One of the easiest ways to find literature reviews in Google searches is to include ‘literature review’ in your search. When we do that, we get a better list. This time, there are more results (97,000), but they are better results. Notice the third item…
- all your keywords
- lots of citations
- much more recent (2019)
- AND it is a systematic review
This is the only article you need for now. Click the link.
In fact, you don’t even need to read this article yet. All you need is the DOI - the Digital Object Identifier. A DOI is a critical piece of information about an article that provides a piece of evidence that this is a legitimate article published in a legitimate journal. A DOI will always start with 10.. Sometimes, it is included as part of a URL, like in this case, but you only need the code that follows ‘10.’. The DOI for this article is 10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004
Copy the DOI. Sometimes you need to copy the whole URL, and that is ok.
Log in to Litmaps.com
Paste the DOI.
You will notice that LitMaps will be able to find the article and will present it as an option for you to click. Go ahead…click.
LitMaps will create what they call a Seed Map, which you can see in the image below.
The seed map shows an AI-generated map of the 20 most relevant articles related to the seed article. Each dot represents an article. The seed article is shown as a dot with a little sprout in the middle. The size of the dot is related to how many references are in the article (smaller dot = fewer references). Dots near the top of the map have more citations, and dots near the right side of the map are more recent. The map will always look like a bit of a waterfall as older articles tend to have more citations. This map can be very helpful in finding very impactful, recent articles as those articles will be in the top right quadrant of the map.
When you are signed in to LitMaps, you are able to create ‘Collections’ of articles. To do this, click on an article in the seed map, then read through the abstract. This might tell you that the article is not related to your search, but if it is, as in the image, then click ‘Edit Collections’ then ‘New Collection’. Give the new collection a name, and click ‘Done’.
Next, add Hoch, 2018 to your new collection (it is closest to the upper right quadrant), and finally add Greenleaf, 1979 (all the articles seem to cite this article, so it is likely very important in the field, sometimes called a ‘seminal article’).
Notice that the articles you added to your new collection are all coloured the same as the collection.
Next, click ‘Discover’ in the left-hand menu bar, then click ‘New Search’, then ‘Add from your Library’.
Make sure you are in the correct Collection, and click ‘Add 3 Inputs’.
Click ‘Find Related Articles’.
This will result in a new set of articles that are related to all three of your initial input articles. As you add more inputs, you will get a more refined result list until you have a nicely curated list of related articles.
To add an input article, click on it in the map or list and choose ‘Add to Search’, then ‘Expand search’ to execute a new search with the new articles you added.
Notice that this search turned up another impactful article. Make sure to add that to your list!
Click ‘Your Library’ and choose the library you just created. There should be 8 or so references in the library. This is likely enough to synthesize into a short paper, but some disciplines may require more. Select all of the items in the library by clicking the checkbox that says ‘0 Selected’. Then click the ‘Export’ icon on the right side of the screen.
Choose ‘RIS’ in the dropdown, then click ‘Download’.
For more tutorials on using Litmaps, search online. For example, The Litmaps YouTube channel has some helpful videos.
Activity: Using Litmaps
- Choose a research topic that interests you. Tip: Consider the course you are taking, or will take in the future. What key topics do you want to learn more about? Here are some other links that may help you decide:
- Choosing a Topic from Purdue University
- Building Your Research Skills from the TWU Library.
- How do I choose a research topic? from University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Conduct a general Internet search for “Topical issues in Business” or “Topical issues in Higher Education” and scan whether any of these issues are of personal interest.
- State your topic in the form of a question. For example:
- How will robotics impact on the future of work?
- What can businesses do to run successful loyalty programmes?
- How can technology prepare learners for a future that is increasingly defined within the context of globalization and technology?
- How will mobile technology impact on diagnosis and health care?
- Review your draft research question taking into account:
- Personal interest: Does the research question interest you?
- Suitability for academic investigation: Some questions are not possible to answer through academic enquiry, for example “How beautiful is the colour orange?” Identify a few keywords related to your proposed research question and conduct a general search to determine if there is published and accessible research outputs related to your question.
- Attainability: Make sure that your question can be answered taking the amount of time you have. For example, “How do we solve global disease?” is too broad. Whereas, “What is my neighbour’s favourite colour” is too narrow. You will be looking to target between 8 to 15 scholarly references to prepare an annotated bibliography, including books, journal articles and reputable web site references in support of your analytical essay.
Use Litmaps to explore the literature on the topic of your choice.
Take a screenshot of your Litmaps map and paste it to a journal entry in Obsidian. Reflect on your use of this tool. What was difficult to learn? How might you use this tool in your future studies?
Activity: The TWU Library
Some of your best advocates on campus or online are the librarians who work at the Norma Marion Alloway Library in Langley. They are extremely knowledgable about finding things that are hard to find, so it is ALWAYS a good idea to talk to a librarian about what you are trying to do. They are literally paid to help you succeed! One of the ways they like to help is by creating what is known as a ‘LibGuide’, and I encourage you to access their LibGuide on using the search feature on the library website..
Take some time to browse the TWU Library website.
See if you can find the answer to the following questions:
- Is it possible to borrow or download an e-book? - I’m a distance student. Can I request to have books or articles sent from the TWU Library to my location?
- Do you have books in languages other than English?
- Do you have e-books?
- Can I Email a Trinity Western librarian anytime with my research questions?
- What is AskAway? - What do I do if I have trouble logging in to library databases from off-campus?
Activity: Advanced Search
Improving search skills will save you time and result in more productive searches. Although we focus on LitMaps and the TWU Library in this course, another tool we want to share is the Google search engine. It provides a number of features to improve your searches in finding academic resources. In this activity, you will select two open resources using the Google advanced search operators in support of your research topic.
- Read the Google advanced search operators cheat sheet and try a few searches using the operators. Also see Google Search Cheatsheet for a more comprehensive list.
- Use the Google search operators (you enter these directly into the search text area) to:
- Identify at least ten pdf documents which have Open Educational Resources in their titles. (Are they all accessible for download?)
- Find a pdf version of the editorial entitled: Scholarship and literacies in a digital age (Who are the authors?).
- Find the article with the following citation in text: the term digital literacies is contested with differing uses of the term revealing competing and even contradictory theoretical perspectives (Who is the author?)
- Visit the Google Advanced Search web interface:
- Conduct a search for digital literacies and scan the results
- Go back to the Google Advanced Search web interface and remove words from the search, for example “skills” or “school” and compare the results.
- Click on tools and find results for the date range 1 May 2020 to 1 May 2023
- Click on images and find versions which are licensed for reuse with modification (useful when sourcing images for your course blog with the necessary legal permissions for reuse).
Other Search Engines:
- Google Scholar is a good search engine to find scholarly publications. The downside is that Google Scholar does not distinguish between closed and open resources. However, search results which show a pdf next to the listing will probably provide access to a full text version.
- Unpaywall is a free and legal way to identify authored-uploaded pdfs. There are extensions for the Chrome and Firefox open source browsers. Read the frequently asked questions for more information.
Activity: Database search
This activity focuses on searching database repositories. Most databases provide advanced search features, however there are differences in how each database site implements search functionality.
- View the following resources on searching using databases.
- Top ten database search tips published by Berkley City College Library.
- Searching in databases published by the University of Queensland Library.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – see also FAQs
- BASE Advanced Search
- View the following video on using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
- Using your keywords and synonyms generated for your research question, search for journal articles using the DOAJ search engine and/or the BASE Advanced Search.
- As appropriate, adapt your search by narrowing or expanding. Remember to be flexible; if one term doesn’t work, try a different one.
- Select a minimum of two resources, more if you like to save time later in the course.
- Based on the resources you find, think about whether you need to modify your research question.
How was your progress with this activity? Feel free to share your thoughts in Obsidian. For example:
- Finding resources for my topic was …
- I found …. helpful.
- Database search tip: When …
Evaluating Resources
A key part of finding and selecting resources is evaluating the resource. There is a great deal of information available on the Internet. Some of it is very credible and useful. However, there is a lot of misinformation and poorly researched information online too. As you become more skilled at academic online searching and locating materials you will become quicker at determining what information is useful and credible.
So how do you evaluate the sources to ensure you are using credible sources? The following technique called, the CRAAP test, will help you evaluate the sources you find.
C - Currency R - Relevance A - Authority A - Accuracy P – Purpose
Activity: Using the CRAAP Test
Watch How Library Stuff Works: How to Evaluate Resources (the CRAAP Test) that illustrates a set of steps you could take to evaluate sources.
Questions to Consider
After completing the activity above, consider the following questions:
- Which part of the CRAAP test did you find most useful in evaluating sources?
- What steps can you take when you evaluate any sources you find?
Reliability of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia created through collaborative effort of contributors from around the globe. Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world. When conducting general Internet searches, Wikipedia articles will frequently be listed in the top results.
Anyone registered on the Wikipedia site can create a new article page. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia article, and registration is not required to edit existing articles.
There have been a number of studies examining the accuracy of Wikipedia articles. Notwithstanding the outcomes of these studies, many educational institutions will not accept the use of Wikipedia as a credible source for academic writing and research. In this section we invite learners to evaluate whether Wikipedia is a trustworthy resource and to form a justified opinion on its use as a reliable resource for academic writing.
Activity: Wikipedia: Why or Why Not?
Consider the following statement:
Wikipedia is a reliable source for academic study
Do you agree? Have you cited Wikipedia in any academic work? Why or why not?
Read the following:
- Is Wikipedia a Trustworthy Academic Resource? Scientists Think So published by EdTech Magazine.
- Reliability of Wikipedia article on Wikipedia.
- Should university students use Wikipedia? published by theguardian.com. Optional reading annotations: Conduct a search for credible and reliable resources on the topic of the reliability and credibility of Wikipedia articles.
Next, watch Using Wikipedia for Academic Research (CLIP)
Drawing on your study of the reliability and credibility of online resources share your advice to fellow learners on this course regarding use of Wikipedia for academic purposes by posting a comment on Discourse. For example:
- You can use Wikipedia for … because …
- You should not use Wikipedia for … because …
Reference Management
Now that you have a handful of references to keep track of, it’s time to get started with Zotero to help you manage your references. I promise that learning to use a reference manager like Zotero will save you MANY hours per semester, and likely days or weeks over the course of your degree. Do Future You a huge favour and get in this habit now.
Before you explore the next essential tool, watch Benefits of Using Citation Management Tools
Download and Install Zotero
The RIS file you exported from LitMaps isn’t going to be very useful unless you have software that can read it properly. Your best option is Zotero as it is free and open source and has a good number of plugins and integrations you can use to connect with other apps.
Go to zotero.org and click the red ‘Download’ button. Then follow the instructions to install Zotero on your computer. If you want to sign up for free storage (300MB) and backup for your library, you can also do that here.
Once you have installed Zotero, there are some plugins that will help you in your studies. These are listed below with links to instructions on how to install and configure the plugin.
- Zotfile - allows you to find and manage PDFs in your Zotero library
- Citation Counts Manager - automatically update citation counts for items in your library
- scite.ai - provides a breakdown of how references are cited in the literature
Now that you have Zotero ready to go, it’s time to import your first references. Find the ‘untitled.ris’ file in your downloads folder and double-click it to open. You might have to confirm that you want to open with Zotero.
Keep in mind that each journal system will name the downloaded file differently, but they should all end in .ris.
Zotero and the Library
LitMaps is not the only way that you can connect to Zotero. You can also export items directly from a search in the library databases.
Go to twu.ca/library and search for ‘transformational servant leadership’. On the results page, you might notice that you are prompted to sign in to see certain items. There is a yellow banner at the top of the page with a link to login.
Click on the top item in the list of results
Then click on the ‘Export’ button on the right side. Then choose ‘Direct Export in RIS Format’, then ‘Save’
You might get a message to install the Zotero Connector in your browser, go ahead and do that. Once you have imported the reference, you will have a brand new item in your Zotero library!
From here on to the day you graduate with your BA, then your MA, and finally your PhD, Zotero will be with you and you may find yourself using it every day. I (Colin) am finishing my PhD, and Zotero is ALWAYS open on my computer. It is absolutely indispensible.
Activity: Using Zotero
Now that you have connected LitMaps to Zotero, let’s explore how to use Zotero in your studies.
- Let’s review the basics of Zotero by watching What is Zotero?
Now, let’s start using it! Go to the LitMaps, TWU Library or Google Scholar and find articles that interest you.
Populate your library with the following resources to support a research topic that interests you.
- Manual entry for a published book
- Manual entry for a chapter within an edited book (note that the library record for a book section or chapter should must have separate fields for the author(s) and editor(s))
- Automatic harvesting of bibliographic information for a journal article (if supported by a browser extension or bookmarklet by your preferred citation management tool).
- Automatic harvesting of bibliographic information for a newspaper article (if supported by a browser extension or bookmarklet by your preferred citation management tool).
- Automatic harvesting of a useful resource from the resource bank (Tip: Link through to the source website before harvesting the bibliographic information.)
In each case, review that all relevant fields required for the bibliography have been completed correctly. Don’t rely on the accuracy of the automatic features as this is dependant on the metadata and adherence to open standards on the source website. Pay particular attention to punctuation and consistent use of capitalisation.
- Add descriptive tags. This will enhance searching of your library database.
- Organise your resources using folders.
- Next, play with some of the Zotero annotation features. Watch How to Annotate PDFs in Zotero | Highlight, create notes, and capture PDF screenshots for instructions.
- If you want to take the next step, let’s make your tools work together! Watch the video Zotero Obsidian Integration and see the features offered when you integrate these tools.
- Finally, reflect on your use of this tool. In Obsidian, add a journal entry about your learning process and how you might use Zotero or another citation management tool in your studies.
Openness in Education
At this point in the unit you have used various tools to discover and curate resources. In this topic we would like to introduce you to a value in education that we believe is important for creating a true community of inquiry in higher education. If you haven’t already noticed from the title of this topic, we are thinking about openness. Here is a quick overview from the OER Foundation.
Open Access Explained from OER Foundation on Vimeo.
And here is an article you can read (for free) from the British organization Wonkhe.
OER, or Open Educational Resources, refers to freely accessible and openly licensed educational materials that can be used, shared, and modified without cost. These resources include a variety of digital assets, such as textbooks, lecture notes, multimedia content, and assessment tools. The key features of OER include their open licenses, which typically allow users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the content.
The 5 R’s of Openess
Retain the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
Reuse the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
*This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Source
Why use OER? The usefulness of OER in higher education can be attributed to several compelling reasons:
Affordability: OER mitigates financial barriers for students by providing access to educational materials at no cost. This is particularly significant as the high cost of traditional textbooks and learning resources can be a substantial financial burden for students.
Accessibility: OER promotes equitable access to educational content globally. Anyone with an internet connection can benefit from OER, fostering inclusivity and addressing issues of accessibility in higher education.
Customized Learning Materials: Instructors can tailor OER to align seamlessly with course requirements, creating a personalized learning experience for students.
Community Collaboration: OER encourages collaborative knowledge-sharing among educators and students, fostering a sense of shared learning within the academic community.
**Current and Relevant Content: OER’s adaptable nature facilitates easy updates, ensuring educational materials reflect the latest advancements, providing students with up-to-date information.
**Global Perspectives: The inclusive design of OER integrates diverse global viewpoints, enhancing cultural awareness and expanding students’ understanding of various academic frameworks.
**Ethical Usage: OER operates with transparent licensing, ensuring ethical use of materials and upholding the principles of academic integrity.
In summary, OER offers a cost-effective, flexible, and collaborative approach to educational resource development, making it a valuable and impactful asset in higher education. Its adoption aligns with the broader goals of enhancing accessibility, affordability, and inclusivity in the learning experience.
Activity: Finding OERs
Go to the Open Educational Resources Libguide from the TWU Library. Watch the introduction to OER video and then browse through the category of OERs provided. Take some time to find an OER that relates to a topic that interests you.
In your Obsidian Learning Journal, create an entry about an OER resource you found. Use the CRAAP test to evaluate it, and explain why this resource interests you.
Activity: Advocating for OER
So how do Open Educational Resources affect you as a student? Why should you care? We’ve shared some of the benefits of openness in education, but there are several other reasons OER benefit students.
Watch A Review of the Effectiveness & Perceptions of Open Educational Resources As Compared to Textbooks
Activity: Reflecting on Your Resource
We’ve reached the end of Unit 2, where you have explored several tools and practiced digital skills to help you find and select resources for academic study. As you have practiced the activities in this unit, you have curated a resource bank about the topic of your choice. In this activity, we ask you to write a paragraph about this topic, utilizing the resources you have found.
- Read How to write a good paragraph published by Ashford University.
- Draft a paragraph using your word processor on an issue relating to your research topic.
Your paragraph must contain: - A verbatim quotation extract from one of your sources - A paraphrased fact from one of your sources
- Use the features of your citation management software to integrate
- the in-text reference for your quotation
- the in-text reference for the paraphrased fact
- the automatically generated reference list using the APA style.
- Consult the Quick APA guide to review your formatting.
- Generate a pdf version of your paragraph.
- Prepare a short journal entre of about 150 words sharing your experiences in using citation management software. For example: What worked well?, Did you struggle with any of the instructions? Did you learn any new skills?
Note that this reflection can be uses for your assessment in this course.
Activity: Annotated Bibliography
In this activity you will create an annotated bibliography related to a research topic of your choice.
Read the following resources:
Evaluating online sources:
Preparing an annotated bibliography:
- Writing an annotated bibliography, by Deborah Knott, New College Writing Centre, University of Toronto.
- How to prepare an annotated bibliography, published by Concordia University.
Example:
- Examples of annotated bibliography (Published Purdue University).
Next, create an annotated bibliography in Obsidian for two sources which must include a journal article and a book chapter from an edited collection of chapters from multiple authors.
- You can select resources already saved in your library or search for new ones in support of your research topic.
- Use the note or comment feature of your citation management software to record a copy of your annotation.
- You must use Zotero to generate the reference using the APA format.
Summary
In this unit, you have had the opportunity to develop crucial skills for navigating the digital resource landscape. You are now able to effectively find and evaluate resources, manage citations, and understand the importance of openness in education. These skills will enhance your ability to use digital resources for academic and professional growth responsibly and effectively.
In addition, exploring Openness in Education broadened your understanding of the transformative power of freely accessible educational resources. By delving into the principles of open educational resources (OER) and open access, we hope to have conveyed their significance in making education more accessible. This newfound awareness not only empowers you as a learner but also places you in a role as a contributor to a global academic community. As you conclude this unit with refined skills in resource navigation, citation management, and a deeper appreciation for openness in education, you are well-equipped to responsibly and effectively leverage digital resources for ongoing academic and professional growth. These skills are not just tools for immediate success but enduring assets, shaping your lifelong journey in the ever-evolving realm of digital knowledge.
Assessment
Assignment 1: Learning Journal
The learning activities in this unit are designed to support you as you build your Learning Journal (Assignment 1). Please see the Assessment section in Moodle for details on this assignment. Note the activities also relate to your Digital Literacy Portfolio (Assignment 3), so be intentional about completing each activity in this unit to support your in these assignments.
All assignment details, including the grading rubrics, are located in the Assessment section in Moodle. Please read the instructions carefully and don’t hestitate to reach out for support.
Checking your Learning
Before you move on to the next unit, check that you are able to:
- Describe your engagement with digital technology
- Apply digital tools to support learning in an academic environment
- Explain what digital literacies mean for you in a tertiary education context
- Examine your digital footprint
- Build your professional online biography
- Examine privacy concerns related to various platforms and tools
- Describe how to protect yourself, other students and colleagues, to stay safe in the digital environment.
Connecting Ideas for Learning
Overview
Welcome to our third unit in Learning with Technology, where we explore the symbiotic relationship between technology and knowledge synthesis. In this unit, we will unravel the intricacies of sense-making through hyperlinks and tags, discovering their pivotal roles in creating a cohesive web of information. You will delve into the transformative realm of digital note-taking, learning how to capture, organize, and review key ideas efficiently. As we progress, we will unlock the potential of visual representations through concept maps, using digital tools to illustrate complex relationships and hierarchies that foster a deeper understanding of interconnected ideas. Moreover, we’ll venture into a curated selection of digital tools designed to support and augment the learning process, evaluating their benefits in catering to diverse learning styles and preferences. By the conclusion of this unit, you will not only have mastered the art of connecting ideas through hyperlinks, tags, note-taking, and concept maps, but you will also be equipped with a toolkit of digital resources to enrich your learning journey.
Topics
This unit is divided into the following topics:
- Sense-making through Hyperlinks
- Sense-making through Tags
- Note-Taking
- Concept Maps
- Digital Tools to Support Learning
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit, you should be able to demonstrate your ability to achieve the following course outcomes:
- Build and customize technology-integrated workflows to enhance and enrich your learning journey.
- Practice evaluative judgment to document your process of learning in complex domains of knowledge.
- Evaluate digital tools, platforms, and interactions based on ethical principles.
Activity Checklist
Here is a checklist of learning activities you will benefit from in completing this unit. You may find it useful for planning your work.
Learning Activities
- Practice using links and tags to connect your ideas in Obsidian.
- Write a reflective post on your learning experiences.
- Practice various note-taking skills.
The learning activities in this course are designed to prepare you for the graded assigments in this course. You are strongly encouraged to complete them. If you plan to complete this course in 12 weeks, this unit should take 9-12 hours to complete.
Assessment
- See the Assessment section in Moodle for assignment details and due dates.
Resources
- All resources will be provided online in the unit.
Sense-making Through Hyperlinks
In higher education, your task as an undergraduate is to build on the skills you bring from high school and apply those skills in a much more focussed field of study. Previously, you might have been able to succeed in school by having a great memory, but increasingly in university, you will be asked to do much more. You will be required to understand the theoretical basis of ideas (analysis) and also make connections between ideas to create new ideas (synthesis). This may feel challenging at first, but you will learn.
One of the challenges is that there is simply far too much information for you to analyze for any task that you might need to do for an instructor. In a previous unit, you learned some basic skills in finding and managing resources that you will need, and in this unit, you will learn some ways to begin to analyze and synthesize information and documents in a systematic way.
If you learn this workflow well, and learn how to customize it to your needs (that’s synthesis), you will be ahead of the game when it comes time to complete papers in other courses.
The key to this component of your workflow is the lowly hyperlink. You likely know that if you click or tap on that highlighted word, you will be taken to another website, in this case, the wikipedia article on hyperlinks. That is a hyperlink and it is the most basic unit of the entire internet, which is simply a massive collection of documents all linked together. At it’s most basic form, a hyperlink is simply a connection between two documents where a hyperlink in one document allows you to open the second document.
In this workflow, instead of just linking two documents together, you will link two ideas together (by linking documents). Your Obsidian vault is essentially a website that is only accessible on your computer, and instead of links going to documents on other servers, you link to documents within the vault (although you can still link to the web).
Linking in Obsidian
There are two methods of building hyperlinks in Obsidian: wikilinks and markdown links, and we will cover both here.
Wikilinks
A wikilink, the default in Obsidian, is really simple to build. All you have to do is type two opening square brackets, like this [[, and Obsidian will do a couple things automatically. First, Obsidian will create the closing brackets to match, so you end up with this [[]], with your cursor in the middle, and second, Obsidian will present a list of all the pages in your vault, from which you can choose the page you want linked.
Once you choose a page, Obsidian will do the rest, and you will end up with this view:
As you can see, I am on the ‘Hypothes.is’ page, and I have created a link to the ‘Zotero’ page. If I press and hold the ‘Command’ (macOS) or ‘CTRL’ (Windows) button on my keyboard and then hover over the link, I will get a preview of the Zotero page. If I press and hold the ‘Command’ (macOS) or ‘CTRL’ (Windows) button on my keyboard and then click the link, I will be taken to the page. Once I am on the Zotero page, I can scroll to the bottom of the page and see the ‘Backlinks’ (a link back to the ‘hypothes.is’ page). If you don’t see the backlinks, click the three dots in the top, right corner of the page and choose ‘Backlinks in document’.
Markdown Links
While wikilinks are the default in Obsidian, and are the easiest way to link within your vault, sometimes you might want to link to a site on the web. The syntax for a markdown link is a bit different, but is still very simple. There are two parts you need to remember:
- the link text
- this is what you want your reader to see on your page.
- the link URL
- this is the web address of the site you want them to visit.
Here is the syntax - [Link text between single square brackets](URL inside parentheses) So if I want someone to see the word ‘YouTube’ on the page, and for them to be taken to the YouTube website when they click the link, the syntax would be [YouTube](https://youtube.com) which will display like this YouTube. Notice that there are no spaces between the closing square bracket and the openning parenthesis.
Why link?
Creating links to other related topics in your notes is a way that you can start to build connections in your mind about how different ideas are related. For example, if you are studying ‘trees’, you might want to link over to the previous notes that you created on ‘plants’, ‘forests’, or ‘climate change’. During your study on trees, you might want to create notes on ‘deciduous’ and ‘coniferous’ trees or ‘xylem’ and ‘phloem’, and link those articles to ‘trees’. by continually linking notes that are related, you are creating a web of your knowledge as well as reminders of how ideas are related. So linking is a way for you to make sense of the information that is coming into your conciousness.
Once you have links created between different files in your vault, you can visualize these links using the ‘Graph View’ in Obsidian. Here is part of the graph view for a major paper I wrote recently. Each of the white dots represents a file in my vault and the size is relative to the number of pages linked to that article. You can see that there are three really big pages that have many links. Those are clearly very important pages.
Activity: Link, Connect & Reflect
Follow the directions above to add notes to Obsidian on a topic of interest. Search online for interesting articles and videos you want to add to your notes. Practice using wikilinks and markdown links. Locate the ‘Graph View’ in Obsidian to see the connections between the ideas you’ve added.
After spending some time practicing this new skill, write a reflective journal entry on the process you followed and what your experience was like. What did you struggle with? How did you troubleshoot? What are the advantages of organizing your notes using this method?
Feel free to discuss your experience on the Learning Hub in Discourse. You can also post any questions you have about this process and get technical support from your instructors and facilitators.
Sense-Making Through Concept Maps
As you watched at the beginning of this unit, sense-making is the work of learning. There is no way around the work of learning because learning is work. It takes time and cognitive effort. As much as we wish to be able to ‘learn’ like Neo in The Matrix, we can’t (see one of my favourite scenes in a movie, below; and it’s not just because Keanu Reeves is the GOAT 🐐).
Tags and links in Obsidian can be visualized using the graph view, but as this is an algorithmically generated map of the connections between ideas and files in your vault, there is little you can do to customize it. Fortunately, Obsidian also features a tool called the Canvas, which is a blank space that you can use to manually connect ideas in a visual format, allowing you to see connections and relationships that make sense to you. The following video is a brief explanation of how to use the Canvas in Obsidian.
Activity: Open Video and Audio Lectures
Search for a video or audio lecture on a topic of interest. Use your advanced search skills or browse the following sites to find a suitable recording aligned with your interests.
- Open culture: Over 30,000 hourse of free audio and video lectures.
- Open Yale courses: Free and open access to a selection of introductory courses including video lectures from Yale University.
- Open learning at Harvard: Series of video lectures from Harvard University.
- MIT Opencourseware: Series of audio and video lectures from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Tedx talks: Extensive database of video presentations in the form of short, powerful talks. (See also list of topics).
Using Obsidian, record your notes from the lecture. - The first line is used for the title of the note.
- Remember to include a link to the source of the information.
- Use tags and links to connect your ideas.
Next, let’s focus on reading and note-taking. In this section, you will demonstrate your note-taking skills based on reading an academic publication. You will also have the opportunity to practice using the Markdown markup language. Semantic markup is an important digital skill which separates formatting (e.g. headings, bold, italics, lists etc.) from the content using designated characters without the use of rich text editors. This provides the capability to use plain text files that can be converted to formatted text online. Markdown is one of many markup protocols, and is used here to demonstrate the principles of semantic markup.
Activity: Reading & Note-taking
Read the following articles and take notes in Obsidian.
- Effective note taking published by the University of New South Wales. - Reading for Understanding: The SQW3R Method published by the University of New South Wales. - How to (seriously) read a scientific paper
Try using Markdown to format your text. - Basic formatting syntax - Using Markdown in Obsidian
Activity: Writing a Summary of your Readings
In this activity you will read an academic article and write a summary in Obsidian and Zotero.
- First, search for a peer reviewed journal article in support of a research topic of interest.
- Remember to add the source to your citation management tool, Zotero.
- Prepare a summary of the journal article based on this example.
- Use the Markdown formatting in Obsidian. Your summary must at a minimum demonstrate the following text formats:
- Headings and subheadings
- Bold and italics
- Numbered or unordered list
- Labelled link
- Horizontal rule
- Block quote for one or more citations from the article
Copy your summary prepared in Obsidian and paste this text summary into Zotero using the notes feature so that you have a copy for your personal library as backup.
Reflect on your progress in practicing these digital skills. Share you thoughts in your Reflective Journal and/or in Discourse.
Digital Tools to Support Learning
So far in this course you have had opportunities to explore a number of learning tools, including Obsidian, Zotero, and LitMaps.
We anticipate these tools will help you think critically, collaborate, and ultimately succeed in your studies.
There is a plethora of other learning tools out there. We encourage you to explore various apps and evaluate them based on criteria you value (effectiveness, privacy, cost, data ownership, accessibility, etc.).
Activity: Tools for Learning in University
Search for the following apps/websites using the key words listed below. Try adding “top” “best” “free” “university” “students” and see how that changes your search results.
- Note-taking Apps
- Annotate Web Resources
- Collaborative Tools
- Project Management Tools
- Graphic Organizers
- Study Tools
- Focus Tools
- Research Tools
- Writing Tools
In Discourse, share some tools that you’ve used, or that you plan to use to help in your studies.
Summary
As we conclude our unit, reflect on the your learning. Throughout this unit, you’ve acquired a multifaceted skill set that empowers you to harness the potential of technology in synthesizing and organizing knowledge. From understanding the intricate dance of hyperlinks and tags to mastering the art of digital note-taking, you’ve explored tools and strategies that redefine how we connect ideas in the digital age.
Concept maps have become your canvas, allowing you to visually articulate complex relationships and hierarchies with precision and clarity. The curated digital tools we’ve explored are now at your disposal, enhancing your learning experience and catering to your unique preferences. Remember, this unit isn’t just about understanding concepts; it’s about applying these newfound skills in real-world scenarios.
As you move forward, carry this digital toolkit with you, leveraging technology as a powerful ally in your ongoing pursuit of knowledge. Your ability to connect ideas seamlessly through hyperlinks, tags, note-taking, and concept maps positions you as a dynamic learner in an ever-evolving educational landscape. The skills you’ve honed here are not just for this course but are lifelong assets that will continue to enrich your learning journey.
Assessment
Assignment 1: Learning Journal
The learning activities in this unit are designed to support you as you build your Learning Journal (Assignment 1). Please see the Assessment section in Moodle for details on this assignment. Note the activities also relate to your Digital Literacy Portfolio (Assignment 3), so be intentional about completing each activity in this unit to support your in these assignments.
All assignment details, including the grading rubrics, are located in the Assessment section in Moodle. Please read the instructions carefully and don’t hestitate to reach out for support.
Checking your Learning
Before you move on to the next unit, check that you are able to:
- Build and customize technology-integrated workflows to enhance and enrich your learning journey.
- Practice evaluative judgment to document your process of learning in complex domains of knowledge.
- Evaluate digital tools, platforms, and interactions based on ethical principles.
Building Your Online Presence
Overview
Welcome to Unit 4! In previous units, you’ve been introduced to the world of digital literacies and learned how to utilize various tools for organizing and connecting ideas. You have started to build a workflow to help you learn more effectively, and have applied the critical skill of metacognition to explain your process for learning.
Now, let’s dive into the next phase of our learning journey.
In the second half of the course, you will continue to build your digital skills and apply critical thinking to document your learning process. Our focus will shift from creating a personal collection of ideas to presenting your learning in a more open platform. It’s important to emphasize that you will decide how public you want to be. We’ll also explore the significance of knowledge sharing and examine user-friendly methods to do so while maintaining control over your work and addressing privacy concerns. As you begin this unit, take a moment to reflect on your personal and academic goals as they relate to digital literacy. Consider which digital tools you’d like to explore and reflect on how your online contributions can not only benefit your own growth but also contribute positively to others.
Topics
This unit is divided into the following topics:
- Personal Learning Environments
- Building a Learning Blog
- My Digital Footprint
- Evaluating Digital Tools
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit, you should be able to:
- Create a personalized narrative to document and express your learning process
- Examine your digital footprint and develop a positive digital online identity
- Evaluate digital tools, platforms, and interactions based on ethical principles
- Critically evaluate the affordances and restraints of digital tools and platforms
- Identify the digital skills needed in your field of study
- Describe how to protect yourself, other students and colleagues, to stay safe in the digital environment
- Practice evaluative judgment to document your process of learning in complex domains of knowledge
Activity Checklist
Here is a checklist of learning activities you will benefit from in completing this unit. You may find it useful for planning your work.
Learning Activities
- Reflect on your Personal Learning Enviroment as you engage with the resources on PLEs.
- Create a new blog on WordPress and personalise your blog site.
- Conduct a Digital Footprint Audit to assess your online presence.
- Document and share your learning experience by publishing a blog entry.
- Evaluate a digital tool, considering the ethical implications
Learning activities are designed to prepare you for graded assigments. You are strongly encouraged to complete them.
If you plan to complete this course in 12 weeks, this unit should take 9-12 hours to complete.
Assessment
- Assignment 2: Digital Citizenship Blog (Submit after you complete Unit 5)
See the Assessment section in Moodle for assignment details.
Resources
- All resources will be provided online in the unit.
Resource Reminders
- Remember to continuously add resources to your Zotero library that align with your learning goals.
- Utilize your community—peers, coworkers, and online communities—as valuable resources! Stay engaged to seek assistance and exchange helpful resources and insights.
Personal Learning Environments
This unit aims to guide you in creating your Learning Blog, the central component of your Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Blog posts serve as reflections on your learning journey and facilitate networking with peers. Your blog also provides instructors and facilitators with valuable insights into your course engagement and learning process. Ultimately, the goal of a PLE is to put the learner at the centre of the online learning environment.
So what is a Personal Learning Environment?
‘Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning; managing both content and process, communicate with others in the process of learning, and thereby achieve learning goals. A PLE may be composed of one or more sub-systems: As such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based services.’ PLE Wiki
A Personal Learning Environment is “a structure and process that helps learners organize the influx of information, resources and interactions that they are faced with on a daily basis into a personalized learning space or experience. In a PLE, the learner develops an individualized digital identity through the perceptual cues and cognitive affordances that the personal learning environment provides, such as what information to share and when, who to share it with, and how to effectively merge formal and informal learning experiences (Castañeda, Cosgrave, Marín, Cronin, 2016) cited in Personal Learning Environments: Research-Based Practices, Frameworks and Challenges.
Which aspects of the two definitions do you find most meaningful? How do you structure your daily interactions and manage the flow of information? In what ways do you communicate your learning experiences to others? Lastly, what specific goals are you aiming to accomplish through your learning journey?
Activity: What is a PLE?
Before you start building your PLE, read the following article:
Questions to Consider
After reading the article, consider the following:
- How do PLEs promote authentic, student-centred learning?
- What are the benefits of a PLE? How would it benefit you?
- What tools do you currently use as part of your learning environment?
Finally, consider the approach taken at TWU as it supports inquiry-rich learning. As you watch the short video below, think about how you could use your PLE to enrich your learning at TWU.
Activity: What is your PLE?
- Take a couple minutes to brainstorm the tools, services and communities that you use to pursue your educational goals. Use your notetaking tool (e.g. Obsidian) to create your list.
- Next, create a graphic organizer to visualize your PLE. You can use Obsidian, or see Best Graphic Organizers for Education for other free options.
Note that you completed a Visitor and Resident Diagram Activity in Unit 1. Feel free to use that graphic organizer and add other tools use use for learning, or that you have been introduced to in this course.
You will be encouraged to post your PLE graphic on your blog…which you will start in the next activity!
Building a Learning Blog
In the next activity, you will gain first hand experience in using blog technology for publishing your own website. You will “declare” yourself online using your PLE (as an alternative to posting an introduction in a closed course forum typically used in a conventional online course). Note that TWU online courses often use Moodle Discussion Forums to facilitate conversations. By using a platform such as Wordpress, you can retain the contents of your posts, as well as the comments of your peers. In an LMS (Learning Management System) such as Moodle, you may lose access to what you have posted in discussions, and more importantly, conversations with your peers. As you create your personal blog in WordPress (or your own selective blog site), you control your data and who can see it.
You will retain control of your data and learning outputs generated during this online course, even after the course is completed. You get to choose:
- The blog service you would like to use, although we recommend WordPress as it is supported by TWU.
- Whether to accept comments on your blog from your peers
- Whether to register your blog for the aggregated course feed so that any posts tagged with the course code (LDRS101) will be harvested for the feed.
A key teaching philosophy of this course is to embed the acquisition of new digital literacies into your learning journey. Knowledge of how to use the Internet and social media technologies will better prepare you for life in a digital world. If this is your first time blogging, you should spend time in setting up your personal digital learning environment. Please remember that your Learning Blog and the social media technologies you use on this course are public, and that you take full responsibility for anything you publish. Do not disclose any confidential information and respect the privacy of others. In short, don’t say anything that you would not want to read on the Internet.
Activity: Setting Up Your Learning Blog
As this is a course focusing on digital literacies, you are asked to establish a Learning Blog, as this will improve your skills and enable you to network with your peers. We recommend using WordPress, as it is supported by TWU. WordPress is an open source website builder and is one of the most popular systems out there because of its versatility. If you already have your own website or you have previous experience using WordPress, you may set up your blog on it and skip the set-up steps described below, but you still need to complete the learning activities.
We are here to help you create your site, so do not hesitate to ask for technical support. Below you will find a number of resources, but if you get stuck, please reach out on Discourse, or email elearning@twu.ca
To get started on creating your site we suggest the following steps:
1. Sign up to create a website
Go to create.twu.ca to sign up for your free WordPress site. Please read all the prompts and instructions carefully! Be sure to read the Privacy Statement carefully before clicking “I Agree.” The information provided gives you excellent guidance regarding digital citizenship, privacy, and how to build a professional digital persona.
You will be prompted to create a domain name, which is your website’s address on the Internet. Often this is referred to as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This is what your users will type in their browsers to reach your site. Make sure that you choose a domain name that is related to you, easy to pronounce and spell, and easy to remember. Once you have done that, we suggest you write all this information somewhere you can access it easily – just in case.
You will also be asked to select a theme for your website. You are free to choose any template you wish. TWU Spark, TWU Hope, and TWU Spartans portfolio are simple to set up and provide easy navigation.
When you choose your theme, your new site will come with a simple menu and instructions for portfolio and website creation.
When you have activated your site (look for a notification in your TWU email), then you are ready to create.
2. Explore your dashboard
The dashboard is the initial area you see when you log in to TWU Create. It’s the centre for your site management and where you create content. From the Dashboard you can navigate to content, settings, themes, plugins, and more.
When logged in to TWU Create, you will always have access to an admin menu visible on your sites. From the menu item that is the name of the blog (second from left), you can find the link to the dashboard. While in the dashboard, the same menu can be used to return to the front view of your site.
Determine the difference between the dashboard used for editing and the published view of your blog. (It is important to know the difference because, when you register your blog for the course feed, you must use the url for the public view of your blog).
Progress check:
- Do you know how to open the published (public view) of your blog in a new window?
- Have you added a browser bookmark to your dashboard and public version of your blog?
Help Tips: When you are in the site administration area of your site, you can get tips on what you are doing by clicking the “Help” menu on the top-right corner. Click on “Help” and read through the Overview describing the elements of the dashboard.
insert - Animation showing location of WordPress help tab - from https://create.twu.ca/eportfolios/wordpress/
3. Review your settings
Review and customise your blog settings from the dashboard according to your preferences.
- Enable Categories and Tags We recommend that you enable categories and tags on your blog.
Categories are best used for broad groupings of topics. For example, if you’re creating a site that reviews pop culture, you might use categories such as Books, Film, and TV.
Tags are more specific keywords that you want to use to associate related content. For example, if you were creating a site that reviews pop culture, you might want to use tags such as science fiction, horror, and action adventure.
You can combine the two! For our review site example, you might be reviewing a romantic comedy. You can assign the broader category Film to the post, then give it some more specific tags such as romantic comedy, or even use the name of the actors and director as tags. People who view that post could use the tags to find related posts around that topic.
Set up Comments Settings (Optional)
WordPress comes with a built-in comment system allowing your users to leave comments on your posts. This comment system is great for user engagement, but it can also be targeted by spammers as well. If you don’t want comments on your posts, then ensure that the ‘Allow comments’ box is unchecked at the bottom of the editor page.
If you do want comments, but want to manage the spam, you’ll need to enable comment moderation on your website.
Visit Settings » Discussions page and scroll down to ‘Before a comment appears’ section. Check the box next to ‘Comment must be manually approved’ option.
4. Personalise your blog
Visit the appearance option on your dashboard and personalise your blog by:
- Changing your theme, header image, background colours and/or image
- Add at least one widget to your blog. Remember — “less is more“. One or two of the following are functional choices: Archives, recent posts, categories or category cloud, and blogs I follow.
You need to hit the “Save” button to save your changes.
5. Add a page & a post
Pages and posts are where the content is housed on WordPress. The biggest difference between the two is that posts are timestamped, whereas pages are timeless.
Pages are for static content. They do not need a publish date. Use pages you want your visitors to always be able to see that content in that spot, no matter when they visit.
Posts are for timely content. They have a publish date, and they are displayed with the newest content at the top (reverse chronological order) of your site’s blog page. Older posts can “fall off” the blog page (the content is still kept, but no longer visible). Posts are what you should think of when you hear the term “blog post.” Usually posts have a comment section, and this is where viewers can write a comment in response to your post. This may be a handy way to receive feedback from your peers. Also, you can categorize or tag your posts, which is useful to help readers locate posts on your blog.
To add a new Page or Post, click the Pages or Posts menu option and then click the Add New link underneath. Another way is to hover your cursor over Pages or Posts and click the Add new link in the fly-out menu.
BLOG CHALLENGE!
Edit a Page: Complete your personal details for display on the “About” page of your blog.
- Progress check: Can you see the updates on your “about” page in the published view of your blog?
Edit a Blog Post: Reflect on your experience of this activity on creating a blog. Click on “save draft” (so you can review before publishing live on the web). Your reflection could for example:
- Introduce yourself and reflect on what you would like to achieve by maintaining a blog to support your learning
- Reflect on what you thought of the activity; Was it easy or hard?
- Share links to any additional resources you found useful in completing the tasks.
- Provide tips for future learners who will be completing this activity. If you were to set up a new blog again, what would you do differently?
- Add anything your readers may find interesting or useful.
6. Add media
Using different types of media to represent your artifacts is a great way to make your portfolio dynamic and keep your audience engaged. Text-heavy pages can get cumbersome regardless of how you arrange it. Media can help with breaking up content or replacing text all together. Consider how you can “show what you know” rather than just simply telling. Media can also be an alternative to simply hyperlinking all your artifacts. Instead of sending your audience off to another site or tab, media can be embedded (see Media Library) to keep your audience contained to your page.
The Media Library on your WordPress site houses the media you upload to your site. WordPress supports a variety of media types such as images, audio, video, and documents. We do suggest that you host your video files in your TWU Microsoft Stream account for optimal playability. Other types of media are typically uploaded and inserted into the text editor when writing a post or page.
BLOG PHOTO CHALLENGE!
Choose a photo to add to your blog post.
- Be sure you have permission to upload the photo. We suggest using an open licence site, such as Pixabay, Unsplash, Pexels, Wikimedia Commons, or Flickr.
- Alternatively, upload your own photo, take a selfie or ask someone to take a photo of you working on this blog post challenge.
BLOG VIDEO CHALLENGE! (Optional)
You may find as you continue the course that you want to share videos you find on the web, or perhaps even your own!
If you’re up for the challenge, consider recording a short video introduction and embed this in your blog post.
Here is a tutorial on how to add a Youtube video or embed one of your own videos to your blog:
7. Publish!
Review your draft post and, when you’re happy with what you’ve written, click on the “Publish post” button.
7. Share your blog
Add a category or tag for your post using the course tag: LDRS101
Post in the LDRS 101 Discourse forum to let your peers know the web address of your blog and ask them to post a comment. This will give you the opportunity to experience how comments function on your blog and to test if they are working properly.
Additional Customizations
When you’re ready to start customizing your blog and putting content in, check out some tutorials available to you:
TWU’s Wordpress Video Tutorials - new sharepoint address?
Beginner’s guide for WordPress by WPBeginner
WordPress Tutorials from University of Victoria
If you are confused about anything it is always good to do an initial Google or YouTube search, reach out on Discourse, or email elearning@twu.ca
Congratulations!! You created your PLE for TWU!
My Digital Footprint
Now that you have created your Learning Blog and introduced yourself online, let’s take a closer look at the information about you available on the internet. Imagine if potential employers were to search for you online. What would they discover, and what would you prefer them to find? As we examine online identities in this topic, we will ask you to consider how you can improve your digital identity in support of your online learning, as well as future employment prospects.
First, let’s clarify some key terms.
We need to distinguish between the technical and human elements of online identity. In this course, we are more interested in the human side of online identity, but in part, this is determined by how technology automates the process of building your digital footprint.
Digital identity refers to the information utilized by computer systems to represent external entities, including a person, organization, application, or device. When used to describe an individual, it encompasses a person’s compiled information and plays a crucial role in automating access to computer-based services, verifying identity online, and enabling computers to mediate relationships between entities. Digital identity for individuals is an aspect of a person’s social identity and can also be referred to as online identity. (Wikipedia: Online).
Digital footprint or digital shadow refers to one’s unique set of traceable digital activities, actions, contributions, and communications manifested on the Internet or digital devices. Digital footprints can be classified as either passive or active. The former is composed of a user’s web-browsing activity and information stored as cookies. The latter is often released deliberately by a user to share information on websites or social media. While the term usually applies to a person, a digital footprint can also refer to a business, organization or corporation. (Wikipedia:Online).
Activity: What is a Digital Footprint?
Watch the following video and consider the steps you would take to control your digital footprint.
Activity: Who am I Online…and Why Should I Care?
Read the following articles:
Questions to Consider
Consider the following questions:
- How does your real-world identity differ from your online identity?
- What factors inhibit or support the sharing of information in building an online identity?
- What is the value of an online identity for learning?
Reminder: As you view online resources in this course, feel free to annotate and discuss web resources publicly in support of your learning. (Digital Tools: Hypothes.is, Discourse, WordPress, etc.)
In addition to evaluating who you are online, ask yourself, “Why Should I Care?”
First, watch the following video, Four Reasons to Care About Your Digital Footprint
Next, select from these resources to inform your views:
- Students turn to Internet to build online presence, showcase work, published on Huffingtonpost.
- Your Online Presence published by the Open University
- UBC’s Digital Tattoo project
- Policy Brief: Privacy from the Internet Society
Finally, consider how much someone could find out about you from your digital footprints. Here’s an interesting video that might cause you to reconsider what you post online.
Activity: Digital Footprint Audit
In this activity you will audit your own digital footprint in order to find out what exists on the internet about you, and reflect on what you want your online identity to be. Follow the steps below to begin.
- Conduct a Google search of your own name (using an incognito or private window in Chrome or Firefox). Search for your first name and surname without parenthesis (for example: snow white) and then with parenthesis (for example: “snow white”). Explore the results of your search.
- Conduct a Google search of your name with the name of current and previous employers.
- Conduct a Google search of your name with the name of previous schools you attended.
- Expand your search to include social media sites, for example: “snow white” twitter; “snow white” facebook; “snow white” youtube etc.
- Note any interesting or surprising findings.
Activity: Blog: My Digital Footprint
Prepare and publish a short blog post of about 250 to 300 words focusing on what you hope to achieve with your online digital identity for learning. Your post can include:
- Reflection: Share your thoughts on the outcomes of your footprint audit. Remember that your blog post is public, so only share what you are comfortable sharing with the world. You don’t need to be specific; for example, you can generalise: “I am satisfied with my digital footprint because …” or “I would like to improve my digital footprint for learning because …”
- Professional versus private: Consider how you want to separate your “private” online identity from your professional and / or learning identity. If you already maintain an online presence (existing blog or social media accounts) think about how you will separate professional / learning posts from private and social life interactions online. For example, maintaining a separate course or learning blog is one way to achieve this distinction. Will you link your personal online identities (e.g. an existing X (formerly Twitter) username or Facebook account) with your learning blog? Will you link your professional online identity (e.g. published online biography or resume) with your learning blog?
- Objectives: List a few objectives for developing or improving your online identity.
- Tag: Add a category or tag to your post using the course tag: LDRS101 (This is needed to harvest links to posts from registered blogs for the course feed.)
Remember: You are in charge of what you post online and you decide what you would like to share for your digital identity for the purposes of this course. Don’t share high risk personal details like physical address, date of birth, name of first pet, etc., which may make it easier for identity thieves to appear more credible. If unsure, consult online resources for internet safety; for example Get Cyber Safe from the government of Canada.
Evaluating Online Tools
So far in Unit 4, you have created a Learning Blog in WordPress, explored your social media platforms, and used a range of other tools like Zotero, Hypothes.is, Discourse, Obsidian, and more.
As we step into this new topic, we encourage you to engage in a critical examination of the online tools you use or are interested in. Beyond the basic considerations of functionality and user-friendliness, we invite you to assess digital tools, platforms, and interactions through the lens of ethical principles.
So how do we evaluate technology on ethical principles? Here are some guiding questions from Ethical EdTech:
Guiding Questions
- Where does power lie, and where are we expected to place our trust?
- To whom is it accessible—for instance, in terms of usability and cost?
- Does it lock us into closed, commercial systems or invite us into open communities?
- Does it give us more control over the learning process, or does it cede that control?
- Does it respect and protect our privacy appropriately?
- Can we access, study, and modify the underlying code or design?
- Who owns the infrastructure and our usage data? Does it produce private profit or public commons?
These crucial questions highlight the importance of privacy, data ownership, and accessibility. What other questions would you ask to ensure a tech tool is ethical?
Activity: What Are My Criteria?
Read the following Rubric for Digital Tool Evaluation. Note there are a number of criteria, some that may not apply to the tool you choose to evaluate. In this activity, create your own criteria for evaluating digital tools. Set up a spreadsheet or notepad (in Obsidian for example) and as you list your criteria, consider why that detail is important to you.
To help you select your criteria, read the following:
- Privacy policy from the Internet Society
- Ethical EdTech
This next website might be a bit of an eye-opener. You may want to browse through some common tech examples and see their score.
Finally, read the following questions and consider what you want to add to your rubric considering the context of the tool, the terms of service, and the purpose.
Business Context
- Who owns the tool?
- Who is the tool maker or CEO?
- What are their politics? Does that matter?
- What is the tool’s history?
- How do they market themselves?
- How does the company generate revenue?
- What is their market positioning / point of difference?
- Who are the competitors?
- What do others say about the product? Are these sources reliable?
Terms of Service
- What are the terms of service? Are they easy to find?
- What personal data is required to use the tool (username, real names, email, date of birth etc)?
- Who owns the data?
- How is the data protected?
- Where is the data housed?
- What flexibility do users have to be anonymous?
- Does the tool support open licensing of user generated content?
- How is copyright infringement managed?
- How is user generated content distributed by the company? What license does the user give the company for distributing to third parties?
- Can users delete their accounts or leave the service?
- Can users export their data? What export formats are supported?
- How is personal information managed?
- Can information be shared with third parties, and if so under what conditions?
- Can the company terminate a users account? Under what conditions?
- How are the changes to the terms of service managed?
Fit For Purpose
- Is the tool suitable for the stated purpose?
- How does the design of the tool influence what users can do with the tool?
- Does the tool provide support resources and or help tutorials?
- Search the web to find out if others provide help and advice on using the tool (for example Youtube, blog posts etc.)
- What are the implications or opportunities of the tool to support learning in a digital age?
Activity: Evaluate a Digital Tool
In this challenge, you are invited to critically evaluate an online tool.
Step 1: Set Your Goals
As you select the tool you want to evaluate, consider your goals for improving your digital skills.
- What do you want to do or learn online?
- What skills are needed in your academic area and profession?
- What tool would be helpful for you and your peers to know more about?
Step 2: Choose a Tool
Examples of tools:
Please select any online tool, or choose one from the list below.
- Blogging: Blogger, WordPress, Medium, Tumblr
- File sharing: Dropbox, Nextcloud, MediaFire, Google Drive, SugarSync
- Presentations: Haikudeck, Prezi, Google Slides, Slides (using Reveal.js)
- Online collaboration: Basecamp, Slack, Rocket.chat, Hipchat
- Video conferencing: jitsi, Anymeeting, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams
- Feed aggregators: Feedly, Panada, NewsBlur, Inoreader, Feedreader.
- Project management: Trello, Kanboard, Freedcamp, Asana, Notion, GitHub
Step 3: Evaluate the Tool
Use your chosen rubric or guiding questions to complete your review
Step 4: Share Your Insights!
Prepare a blog post (about 450 – 600 words) where you publish a critical review of your selected tool.
Your blog post must:
- State your intended purpose for the tool
- Highlight strengths and weaknesses (Company reputation, software features, terms of service etc.)
- Include hyperlinks to appropriate web pages
- Include references using the APA style if required
- Include if applicable a disclaimer or disclosure, that is whether you have any association with the company or tool that may impact on the review.
- Include concluding recommendation(s)
- Include a comment on whether the tool fit for your stated purpose?
- Include a comment on whether the extent to which the tool would be useful for learning in a digital age?
- Add a category or tag for your post using the course tag: LDRS101
Optional: On Discourse, let us know what tool you selected and why. Share the link of your review blog.
Summary
In this unit, you have had the opportunity to learn about your personal learning environment and build your presence on the web using a blog. You’ve examined your digital footprint and reflected on your online identity - what it is now, and where you want it to be. You’ve also had an opportunity to evaluate digital tools and their ethical implications, and consider what tools will help you academically and personally. As you continue with the last two units of the course, we want to encourage you to examine your purpose in using technology, as well as how your contributions online can benefit others.
Assessment
Assignments 2 and 3: Blog and Portfolio
The learning activities in this unit are designed to support you as you create your Digital Citizenship Blog (Assignment 2), as well as your Digital Literacy Portfolio (Assignment 3). You are encouraged to submit your blog for grading once you have completed all the Unit 5 activities. Your portfolio can be submitted as you complete Unit 6.
All assignment details, including the grading rubrics, are located in the Assessment section in Moodle. Please read the instructions carefully and don’t hestitate to reach out for support.
Checking your Learning
Before you move on to the next unit, check that you are able to:
- Create a personalized narrative to document and express your learning process
- Examine your digital footprint and develop a positive digital online identity
- Evaluate digital tools, platforms, and interactions based on ethical principles
- Critically evaluate the affordances and restraints of digital tools and platforms
- Identify the digital skills needed in your field of study
- Describe how to protect yourself, other students and colleagues, to stay safe in the digital environment
- Practice evaluative judgment to document your process of learning in complex domains of knowledge
Building a Network of People
Overview
In Unit 5 we engage in academic learning as a digital citizen of the internet. In this unit you will continue to develop a positive digital online identity in support of learning while adhering to best practices for privacy, security and interpersonal communications. We will discuss digital citizenship and how that relates to our personal and professional online identity. You’ll have the opportunity to evaluate your social networks and join new online communities, including the TWU Online community. We hope you will take advantage of the opportunties to connect, build your personal and professional learning networks, and share your knowledge.
Topics
This unit is divided into the following topics:
- Digital Citizenship
- Online Communities
- Connecting and Learning through Social Media
- Joining the TWU Community
Learning Outcomes
When you have completed this unit, you should be able to:
- Discuss the dimensions of digital citizenship for work and learning in the 21st century and how these differ from the off-line environment
- Outline the rights and responsibilities of a digital citizen
- Explore professional online identity and networking in the field of your choice
- Reflect on the balance between public and private in a digital world
- Evaluate a range of social media, technologies and communities appropriate for supporting learning
- Develop online learning networks to discover and share knowledge, collaborate with others, and become engaged digital global citizens
- Consider how you might connect, thrive, and serve in the TWU learning community
Activity Checklist
Here is a checklist of learning activities you will benefit from in completing this unit. You may find it useful for planning your work.
Learning Activities
- Write your personal definition of a digital citizen.
- Listen to the podcast by Autumn Caines on Digital citizenship.
- Read Nine elements of digital citizenship by Mike Ribble and apply elements to your academic study.
- Explore resources on Digital Rights and Responsibilities and join a discussion on an issue that interests you.
- Explore resources on professional online identity and networking in the field of your choice and reflect on your findings.
- Update your professional online biography and the “About” page of your course blog.
- Map your Social Network and consider the online communities you might join.
The learning activities in this course are designed to prepare you for the graded assigments in this course. You are strongly encouraged to complete them. If you plan to complete this course in 12 weeks, this unit should take 9-12 hours to complete.
Assessment
- Digital Citizenship Blog See the Assessment section in Moodle for assignment details.
Resources
- All resources will be provided online in the unit.
Resource Reminders
- Remember to continuously add resources to your Zotero library that align with your learning goals. - Utilize your community—peers, coworkers, and online communities—as valuable resources! Stay engaged to seek assistance and exchange helpful resources and insights.
Digital Citizenship
Before attempting to define digital citizenship, let’s consider the concept of citizenship in its own right. In its simplest form, citizenship refers to the rights, privileges and duties of being a national citizen. However, the concept of being a good citizen encompasses much more, particularly if you think about full engagement as a member of society.
“Citizenship is a status that is bestowed on those who are full members of a community.”
-—T.H. Marshall
Activity: Reflecting on Digital Citizenship
If good citizenship means to fulfill your role as citizen, can you think of five things good citizens do? Consider the following questions:
- In a digital world, is loyalty to your country a necessary component of the definition of good citizenship?
- Is education a pre-requisite for good citizenship?
- In a digital world, what does it mean to be a global citizen? Read the Wikipedia article on Global Citizenship Education where learners engage in solving real world problems.
- Has the concept of good citizenship changed over time? In what ways?
- Does citizenship require active community engagement? Read this post by Kristen Mattson, director of a high school library media center: John Dewey Would Hate Your Digital Citizenship Curriculum.
- Why has the concept digital been linked with citizenship or should we drop the word digital and just talk about good citizenship?
Write your thoughts in your Reflective Journal (using Obsidian or WordPress).
Conclude by writing down a description of “digital citizenship” in your own words. (You will need this later for the assessment. It does not need to be a scholarly definition – just your personal thoughts on the concept.)
Defining Digital Citizenship
Defining digital citizenship is not easy because it means different things to different people. It is also a concept which is debated among scholars researching the field.
If you conduct a general search for “digital citizenship” you will find many links referencing resources targeting the school-level, with a focus on safe, skilled and ethical use of online technology. While these aspects are important, for the purposes of this tertiary-level course, we need to explore the concept of digital citizenship in more detail.
Activity: Podcast on Digital Citizenship
In this activity you will listen to a podcast that focuses on the people dimension of digital citizenship.
Meet Autumm Caines, associate director of academic technology from the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Capital University in a podcast with Bonni Stachowiak.
Listen to the first 15–20 minutes of this Teaching in HigherEd podcast on Digital citizenship. The podcast introduces aspects of digital citizenship and the learner experience in starting out with engagement with social media.
Guiding framework
Autumm Caines provides a useful framework for thinking about digital citizenship
- Digital identities that is who you are online including the identities of others (individuals and organisations).
- Digital environments, specifically the tools and online spaces we use to interact with each other. (For example Facebook, Discourse, X, Blogs, Forums etc.).
- Interactions between these identities and environments.
Activity: Refined Definition of Digital Citizenship
The purpose of this activity is to explore the elements of digital citizenship with particular emphasis on those relevant to your academic study.
Read through the following resources in order to refine your own definition of what it means to be a Digital Citizen.
Step 1: Online Search:
- Read the introductory section of the Wikipedia article: Digital citizen
- Conduct a general search for “definition of digital citizen.” Choose the two best definitions and add these to the library of your citation management tool (Zotero / Obsidian), or keep a record for citation purposes.
- Try and locate one recent scholarly definition for “digital citizen.” Record the reference for citation purposes. How recent is the reference?
Step 2: Social Media Search:
- Explore the recent tweets (on X or whichever social media app you prefer) using the following hashtags: #digitalcitizenship, #digiciz, and #digicit. Compile a list of elements relating to the concept of digital citizenship.
Step 3: Search & Read: - Read Nine elements of digital citizenship by Mike Ribble
- Search for other academic articles on digital citizenship using Google Scholar, LitMaps, or the TWU Library.
Step 4: Apply the Elements Generate a table listing the nine elements of digital citizenship and identify a practical example of the element for your academic study: For example:
| Element | Academic Study Example |
|---|---|
| Digital access | Students from low income countries may not have reliable or affordable access to the Internet. |
| Digital commerce | |
| Digital communication | |
| Digital literacy | |
| Digital etiquette | |
| Digital law | |
| Digital rights and responsibilities | |
| Digital health and wellness | |
| Digital security |
Step 5: Define Digital Citizenship After completing the steps above, revise your personal description of digital citizenship. Does your new definition differ from your initial description?
Step 6: Share Your Insights! Share a reflection on this activiy by posting either in your blog or on the Discourse forum.
For example:
- I didn’t realize the … is part of digital citizenship because …
- … is not particularly relevant for university learners because …
- … is particularly relevant for university learners because …
Rights and Responsibilities
The concept of citizenship encompasses the rights and responsibilities of individuals. We need to consider what rights and responsibilities come with digital citizenship. In this mini challenge, we explore this topic with particular emphasis on the rights and responsibilities associated with learning in a digital age.
Following the hype of massive open online courses (MOOC) and the New York Times declaring 2012 the “year of the MOOC,“ a small group of educators drafted “A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in a Digital Age.” This document forms the basis for a course discussion on the rights and responsibilities of digital citizens.
Activity: Rights & Responsibilities of Digital Citizens
- Search: Conduct a general search for rights and responsibilities of digital citizenship to assist in refining your own list for university online study. Your search is likely to generate many results developed for the school sector, so you need to evaluate if these rights and responsibilities are appropriate for you.
Udacity version of the bill of rights: A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age
‘Bill of Rights’ Seeks to Protect Students’ Interests as Online Learning Rapidly Expands, from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Critique of ‘Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age’ from Inside Higher Ed.
Conduct a search through the TWU library for Digital Rights and Responsibilities
Blog: Prepare a table summarising the primary rights and responsibilities for university learning in a digital age.
Discuss: Drawing on your knowledge and experience, please join the discussion on Discourse regarding rights and responsibilities for learning in a digital age at TWU. You can discuss the topical issues listed below, or add new ones to the forum. In each case, justify your position taking opposing views into account.
Topical Issues
- Should higher education institutions have the right to determine what software applications learners should use for their studies?
- Data generated by learners belongs to the learners, therefore should they have the right to access their data (for example forum discussion contributions) even after the course has completed?
- Should higher education institutions reserve the right to ban disruptive learners from their learning platforms?
- Where legally permissible, should learners have the right to access all course materials without the need to register a password?
- Should higher education institutions have the right to limit the time required for completing a course?
- Others?
We encourage you to reply and “like” good posts on Discourse. (Remember to tag your posts using the course code: LDRS101).
Personal and Professional Identity
In short, digital citizenship is about being a person on the web. In the previous unit on building your online presence, we noted that individuals portray different personas online, for example personal, academic and professional.
On the one hand, we need to be careful about what we post online because this can have a negative impact on future career prospects or current employment. We must also be cognisant of the different limitations that different careers place on what can be shared publicly and what needs to stay private. On the other hand, building a strong learning or professional network online is very powerful in staying up to date with new trends and establishing connections with your peers.
In this section, we reflect on the balance between public and private in a digital world, recognising that this is going to be different for each person depending on their own environments and professional circumstances. We will also explore how like-minded professionals in your field of interest network online.
“The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.”
—- Luciano Floridi
Activity: Professional Online Identity and Digital Citizenship
In this activity we will explore professional online identity and networking in the field of your choice.
First, scan a few of the following resources:
- High court rules public servants can be sacked for political social media posts, published by The Guardian.
- ’Think of social media as a virtual resumé,’ expert warns in light of health board resignation, published by CBC News.
- You can also search online using the terms “fired over tweet” or “social media firing cases”.
Next, watch this short video interview with Alec Couros, published by Teaching and Learning in South Australia. Alec summarises how educators are using twitter to connect professionally.
Watch: Using Twitter effectively in education - with Alec Couros
Finally, visit the LinkedIn help page on finding and joining a LinkedIn group.
Questions to Consider
After completing the activities above, answer the following questions:
- How do like-minded professionals in your career or future career, field, discipline etc. network online (for example X, LinkEdIn groups, other websites?)?
- What hashtags, if any, are being used for conversations in your chosen field?
- What are the topical areas of discussion at the moment?
- How could your field of interest improve professional networking online?
- Do organisations in your field place restrictions on employees participating in social networks? (See for example Corporate Social Media Policies: The Good, the Mediocre, and the Ugly, and More Social Media Policies: LA Times, Harvard Law, Microsoft, and Cisco.)
Activity: Blog: Professional online identity and digital citizenship
Prepare a short blog post (about 300 – 400 words) summarising your findings on professional online networking in your field of interest. Consider the following questions:
- How do like-minded professionals in your field network online and what do they talk about?
- What does this mean for your online identity and being a digital citizen?
Remember to add a category or tag for your post using the course tag: LDRS101.
Activity: Blog: My Online Biography
In this challenge you are asked to build or update your professional online biography and the “About” page of your course blog.
- Reflect on the following online personas, target audience and how this will impact on the style and voice of the communication medium.
| Persona | Primary audience |
|---|---|
| Personal | Friends and family |
| Professional | (Future) Employers and professional network |
| Academic | Peer learning network |
- Choose the most appropriate medium for each of your online personas, for example:
| Persona | Medium example |
|---|---|
| Personal | |
| Professional | |
| Academic | Learning blog or website |
- Identify one or two professionals from your field of interest who maintain an active web presence and contribute regularly via social media. Explore their respective websites and professional listings as examples.
- X (formerly Twitter) is a good place to search for individuals using popular hashtags from your field or area of study, for example “#highereducation”.
- Click through to their respective X user page. If they have a personal website listed on the user page, visit the site and review their “About” page.
- Visit their employer’s page and try to locate their biography on the employer’s website.
- Search for the user on Linkedin
- Compare the user information on these different sites. Observe how they link to social media accounts, and vary the style and content presented for the different personas.
- Create or update your professional profile on Linkedin.
- Consult TWU’s Student Resources website which includes information about LinkedIn. TWU gives you access to LinkedIn Learning, which includes several great courses and videos, such as Rock Your LinkedIn Profile.
Create or update your “About” page on your Learning Blog. You may prefer using a more informal style for this page aligned with your own personality and interests. Include links to your professional profile and respective links to social media that you use.
Visit the profile pages of your active social media accounts. Update if necessary providing links back to your main page (for example, the “About” page on your website).
Think carefully about information you post publicly and keep a clear distinction between your personal online presence and your professional online persona. Review your privacy settings on your personal account(s).
Online Communities
In this section we explore the topic of online communities and how we can engage in social media to enhance our learning.
In the early years of the internet, there was a strong research interest in studying the differences between virtual and real communities. However, in more recent years, we have observed a blurring of the boundaries between online and real communities. In The difference between online & real life community? Alison Michalk states:
Community boundaries are blurred to the extent that the Internet is nothing more than a conduit for communication. The Internet is now just another tool that we use to communicate within our various communities. The same as we use mail, telephone and even a car to keep in touch with our friends, family and colleagues. Our ‘real life communities’ are not mutually exclusive from our ‘online communities’ given that it all comes down to implied physical presence. (2013, June 27)
So how do we join and contribute constructively to these digital communities? If you don’t have much experience with online communities, we enccourage you to participate in the course forums and become an active member of the TWU online learning community.
Research on Online Communities
Research on the efficacy of online communities provides insights on selecting productive communities and how to engage. Community contributors can be classified into three types (Mocus et al 2002):
- Core members are responsible for guiding the development of the community and have usually been involved with the community for a long time. These members have made significant contributions to the community’s evolution and have earned leadership status. Frequently they also play an active role in moderation of the group.
- Active members make regular contributions to the community.
- Peripheral members occasionally contribute to the discussions and the periods of engagement are short and sporadic. “Lurkers”, that is individuals seeking answers without making contributions, are normally associated with this group.
The nature of engagement in a community is influenced by the community’s life cycle stage (A. Iriberri and G. Leroy 2009):
| Life cycle stage | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Inception stage | Focus is on determining the purpose, codes of conduct, funding and sustainability. |
| Creation stage | User-centred design and evolution including issues of privacy, anonymity, open versus closed communications. |
| Growth stage | Focus is on community building, for example: recruiting members, growth management, integrating new members, trust building, up-to-date content, interaction support, a few offline and online events and meetings. |
| Maturity stage | By this stage a community culture will have emerged with identifiable community leaders. Focus shifts to permeated management and control, recognition of contributions, recognition of loyalty, member satisfaction management and subgroup management. |
Additional factors identified by the research to keep in mind include:
- Network cohesion, that is the overall level of connections indicated by the network density has a positive impact on the core group as well as the success of the community (Toral et al 2010).
- Network structure. Successful communities need a critical mass of contributors, however there is no fixed number that determines success. Most communities can expect between 45 – 90% of non-active members, but communities with a strong and experienced core group will have a positive impact on success (Toral et al 2010). Moreover, the positive effects of network structure on participation persist irrespective of the life cycle stage of the community, and activity participation influences network structure (Igl 2014).
- Centralization. Communities with a high degree of centralisation and control exerts a negative impact on all participation variables. (Igl 2014).
Practical implications
There are many online communities, and it will be worth your effort in doing a little online research to determine the network cohesion and network structure of the community. You will be able to determine this by reviewing the archive history. Avoid communities with overly centralised control, in the long run, they are not likely to be productive.
When joining an online community, try to identify the life cycle stage by scanning the archive of posts. Young communities are likely to be more tolerant of newbie questions, as responses to these questions will provide support resources for new members in the future. It’s a good idea to search the forum for your answer before posting a question. Don’t be surprised if newbie questions go answered in mature communities, they may can even attract curt rebuttals. If you’re a long standing member of the community, post a tactful reply, for example, “Your question has already been answered” and post a link to the appropriate reply.
The best advice when joining a new community is to lurk for a while before introducing yourself so that you can become familiar with the culture and practices of the community. Fill out your profile page on the forum site, rather than posting a biography in the main discussion threads. Of course, if the community is in the creation phase, you may want to play a more active role in building the community and becoming part of the core contributors.
Communities of Practice
As you continue to reflect on your social network and consider other learning networks to join for personal or professional growth, we want to present another framing of an online community called a Community of Practice.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who “share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”.
– Wenger, 2014
Cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger coined the term “community of practice” when studying apprenticeships as a learning model—the term referred to the community that acts as a living curriculum. Once the concept was articulated the researchers started to see communities everywhere, even when no formal apprenticeship system existed.
The basic premise behind communities of practice is simple: we all learn in everyday life from the communities in which we find ourselves. Communities of practice are everywhere. Nearly everyone belongs to some community of practice, whether it is through our working colleagues or associates, our profession or trade, or our leisure interests, such as a book club. Wenger (2000) argues that a community of practice is different from a community of interest or a geographical community in that it involves a shared practice: ways of doing things that are shared to some significant extent among members.
Characteristics of A Community of Practice
Wenger argues that there are three crucial characteristics of a community of practice:
- Domain: A common interest that connects and holds together the community;
- Community: A community is bound by the shared activities they pursue (for example, meetings, discussions) around their common domain;
- Practice: Members of a community of practice are practitioners; what they do informs their participation in the community; and what they learn from the community affects what they do.
Wenger (2000) has argued that although individuals learn through participation in a community of practice, more important is the generation of newer or deeper levels of knowledge through the sum of the group activity. If the community of practice is centered around business processes, for instance, this can be of considerable benefit to an organization.
Types of Communities of Practice
Today, communities of practices are increasingly being used to improve knowledge management and connect people within business, government, education, and other organizations.
The design of the community will look different depending on the purpose and needs of the participants. There are four basic types of communities:
- Helping Communities provide a forum for community members to help each other with everyday work needs.
- Best Practice Communities develop and disseminate best practices, guidelines, and strategies for their members’ use.
- Knowledge Stewarding Communities organize, manage, and steward a body of knowledge from which community members can draw.
- Innovation Communities create breakthrough ideas, new knowledge, and new practices.
As you reflect on digital practices in university and the workplace, consider how engaging in a Community of Practice could benefit you as a learner and in your future career.
Activity: What Is a Community of Practice?
Watch the video, Communities of Practice (Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner)
To learn more about the origins and theory of communities of practice, see Introduction to communities of practice.
Feel free to discuss your topics of interest in TWU Discourse, or search online for CoPs that interest you.
Connecting to the TWU Community
Our final topic focuses on the TWU community and how you can participate both online and on campus. As a TWU student you have the opportunity to connect with a diverse student body, faculty and staff. What role does technology play in how you communicate with your peers, collaborate on projects, and build relationships?
In this unit we have discussed what it means to be a digital citizen, and how we can engage with online communities. How does this apply to you as a TWU stude nt? As we wrap up this unit, we encourage you to reflect on your personal and academic goals and how you can engage with the TWU community.
Activity: TWU’s Learning Community
Take a moment to re-read the course description for this course:
Introduces theories and competencies related to learning and thriving in a digital world. Explores how learners are situated in ‘the digital’ throughout their lives and how they can use digital technologies to enhance and enrich their experience of learning, working, and playing. Learners will begin to build a curated digital footprint, initiate and develop personal and professional learning networks; develop competencies to allow them to evaluate and choose digital platforms and tools that are safe and ethical; and explore how to use digital technologies to discover, curate, connect, and share knowledge with their communities.
Next, focus on two key course learning outcomes:
- Develop personal and professional learning networks to discover and share knowledge, collaborate with others, and become engaged digital global citizens.
- Create inclusive digital communities which embody a sense of belonging, connection, and Christian hospitality.
Finally, take a look at Trinity’s Life at TWU website.
We invite all TWU students to connect, thrive, and serve in a dynamic, Christ-centred learning community where they can develop as maturing disciples, thoughtful global citizens, and compassionate servant leaders. Experience life and learning here.
How might you connect, thrive, and serve through your connections and contributions online, as well as on campus?
What experiences have you had so far in connecting with your peers and getting to know the TWU community? If you have not participated in the engagement opportunities presented in this course (Discourse, WordPress blog), take the time now to connect!
Once you arrive in Canada, there are more opportunities to connect on campus and online. Watch Get Connected.
TWU on Social Media Here are some other websites you may want to check out for more about the TWU community:
- TWU Facebook page
- X (Twitter)
- Instagram
In your Reflective Journal (Obsidian) jot down your responses to the following questions:
- What are your personal and academic goals for making connections at TWU?
- What steps will you take to make those connections?
- What technology or digital skills will you need to fully engage?
- How can connecting to the TWU community enhance your understanding of digital citizenship and online networking?
Summary
In this unit, you have had the opportunity to learn about what it means to be a digital citizen, including the rights and responsibilities we should abide by. You have had the opportunity to explore and connect with an online community and have reflected on your personal and academic goals for networking. Finally, you have considered your role as a TWU student and how you might build connections with peers, faculty and staff - both online and on campus. As we move on to our final unit, consider how you might share your knowledge online and create an inclusive digital community.
Assessment
Assignment 2: Digital Citizenship Blog
After completing Units 1-5, including the learning activities, you are asked to prepare a learning reflection based on the knowledge you have gained on the concept of digital citizenship.
This assignment is based on the learning activities in Units 4 and 5, as well as the skills practices in previous units. You are encouraged to complete this assignment on your blog. Note that you can control the privacy settings of each post (e.g. so only your instructor can see it, or for the TWU community, or open access for all).
Part 1: Written Reflection
Prepare a learning reflection of about 500–600 words reflecting on the development of your understanding of digital citizenship.
In your Reflective post, provide the following:
- your personal description of digital citizenship;
- your revised definition of digital citizenship based on your research of the topic;
- list of university-level study examples of the elements of digital citizenship;
- a summary of the primary rights and responsibilities for learning in a digital age;
To help you structure your writing, see the following video on Reflective Writing
Your post should cover the following aspects:
D: Describe what happened. What was a highlight from our discussion on digital citizenship?
I: Interpret the events. How did it make you feel? What was “good” and “bad” about the experience?
E: Evaluate the effectiveness. What did you learn from it? How beneficial or useful was this discussion?
P: Plan for the future. What new knowledge or skills do you have and how will your experience inform future learning?
Add a category or tag for your post using the course tag: ldrs101. Post a comment on one or two blog contributions.
Part 2: Video Reflection
For the second part of this assignment, you are asked to create a short video (under 5 minutes) describing your learning process as it relates to our course learning outcomes. Reflect on your demonstration of the following skills:
- Build and customize technology-integrated workflows to enhance and enrich your learning journey.
- Apply digital literacy skills to evaluate the legitimacy, credibility and reliability of online resources for academic study.
- Practice evaluative judgment to document your process of learning in complex domains of knowledge.
- Create a personalized narrative to document and express your learning process
- Evaluate digital tools, platforms, and interactions based on ethical principles.
- Develop personal and professional learning networks to discover and share knowledge, collaborate with others, and become engaged digital global citizens.
- Create inclusive digital communities which embody a sense of belonging, connection, and Christian hospitality.
You are encouraged to post your video reflection on your blog. Remember that you control the privacy settings, so you can share your video blog with the instructor, your peers, and others outside Trinity if you wish.
For more guidance on this assignment, including the grading rubric, see the Assessment section in Moodle.
Assignment 3: Digital Literacy Portfolio
The learning activities in this unit are designed to support you as you create your Digital Citizenship Blog (Assignment 2), as well as your Digital Literacy Portfolio (Assignment 3). You are encouraged to submit your blog for grading once you have completed all the Unit 5 activities. Your portfolio can be submitted as you complete Unit 6.
All assignment details, including the grading rubrics, are located in the Assessment section in Moodle. Please read the instructions carefully and don’t hestitate to reach out for support.
Checking your Learning
Before you move on to the next unit, check that you are able to:
- Discuss the dimensions of digital citizenship for work and learning in the 21st century and how these differ from the off-line environment
- Outline the rights and responsibilities of a digital citizen
- Explore professional online identity and networking in the field of your choice
- Reflect on the balance between public and private in a digital world
- Evaluate a range of social media, technologies and communities appropriate for supporting learning
- Develop online learning networks to discover and share knowledge, collaborate with others, and become engaged digital global citizens
- Consider how you might connect, thrive, and serve in the TWU learning community
Skills List
Below is a checklist of the technical skills, hardware, software, accessories, and other tools that may be required for study at TWU. Don’t worry if you don’t think you can do all these things, there are many ways for you to get help when you need it.
Click on the titles below for information on the tools and skills you are most interested in:
Technology Proficency
First, let’s tackle what technical skills you will need as you start your studies. As you read, make a note of skills you have acquired and feel comfortable using, as well as those with which you are not familiar.
- Basic computer skills
- Operating system navigation (e.g., Windows, macOS, Linux)
- File management (creating, saving, organizing files and folders)
- Keyboard shortcuts (copy, paste, cut, undo, etc.)
- Email etiquette and management:
- Composing professional emails
- Attaching files to emails
- Organizing and managing email inbox (folders, filters, labels)
- Internet proficiency:
- Navigating websites efficiently
- Utilizing search engines, such as Duckduckgo, Google, or others, to locate resources.
- Downloading and installing software
- Being familiar with browser plug-ins, such as PDF readers, video, and audio players.
- Word processing and document creation:
- using templates to create APA- or MLA-formatted documents
- Formatting text with styles
- Creating and formatting tables
- Inserting images and other multimedia elements
- Spell check and grammar check
- Familiar with various file formats, including .pdf (Portable Document Format), .rtf (Rich Text Format), .docx (Microsoft Word Document), .md (Markdown) and .txt (Text document).
Throughout this course you will have ample opportunity to practice these digital skills, and many more. As you encounter new technologies, we encourage you to seek out additional support, such as online video tutorials or instructions. The skill of being a self-directed learner is crucial, especially when encountering unfamiliar tech tools that you need to navigate.
Basic Hardware, Software & Accessories
This section provides an overview of fundamental hardware, software, and accessories you will likely need as a TWU student. As you go through the list, note the items you have, and/or feel comfortable using.
Hardware
- Computer - PC, Mac, Chromebook or tablet
- some academic disciplines and courses may require computers with more capabilities than are available on a Chromebook or tablet. Check with your department.
Software
- Up-to-date versions of the operating system for your computer
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux
- Microsoft Office 365
Recommended Accessories
- Speakers or Headphones
- Microphone
- Video Camera (Webcam)
Internet Access, Browsers & Connection Speed
- Wi-Fi
- High speed Broadband Internet Connection is Required
- Internet Browser: The most recent release of Firefox is recommended.
Recommended Internet speeds:
- Download speed of at least 25 mbps
- Upload speed of at least 3 mbps
- Ping response of less than 100ms
Test your Internet speed using speedtest.net
Please consider the following while participating in online/hybrid courses:
- Using a shared Internet connection, such as additional household members use of streaming TV, gaming, and other Internet usage, will impact the speed of your connection.
- Wireless connections may be impacted by the distance from the router and interference from microwaves and other electronics. (Wired connections are recommended.)
- Your Internet Service Provider’s performance may vary throughout the day based on community usage.
- If you are connecting to a web-conferencing meeting (Zoom, Teams, etc.) please make sure you are in a quiet place, not a coffee shop or other place with lots of background noise.
- If you don’t have a quiet place, make sure your mic is muted, and instead use the text chat.
Shared Drive, Sharing & Backup
Data & Cloud Storage and Sharing
Cloud storage software provides web access to your online file storage, file sharing, and file synchronization. The only TWU approved Cloud Storage & Sharing services are:
The responsibility for storing TWU documents and files lies with the person who stores the data. Judgment is required about how and where TWU data will be stored.
TWU has a formal Information Security Policy and related Information Security Guidelines. This article provides some additional direction based on this set of policy and guidelines.
Different data is governed by different regulations, laws, agreements, and rules; each requires different means of protection and reporting.
What about other 3rd party cloud storage solutions (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, WeChat etc…)? In general, the use of unauthorized 3rd party cloud storage is not a good idea. TWU provides students, faculty, and staff with the tools needed to collaborate internally and externally. The reasons below elaborate on the reasoning behind this position.
Lack of Visibility - Since these software systems are not integrated into our network, there is no way we can retrieve data stored in these systems if a student, employee, or faculty member leaves the institution and fails to disclose the usage of that account, or has it attached to a personal email account. If TWU data are present in those accounts, then it can be easily lost or compromised, which can lead to institutional and legal consequences.
Lack of Accountability - There is no way to effectively manage information security if a student, faculty, or staff member is using unauthorized cloud storage. Additionally, there is no way to know if those data have been compromised and no ability for our forensics team to conduct analyses on these data in the event of a security incident.
Lack of Support - We don’t offer technical support to these services. So, if something goes wrong, is lost or compromised, IT will have no way to help users who have lost data or been locked out of accounts.
Collaboration - We each have our own preferences when it comes to the various technologies we like to work with. There is not always a best tool for everyone. However, collaboration becomes more difficult when each individual or department selects there own collaboration platforms, prioritizing individual needs above the whole.
Student Centred - We will put students first. These guidelines ensure we are protecting information and ultimately protecting our students. We have been entrusted with a great deal of personal and private information and must ensure the decisions we make are protecting that information.
How to Share Data With Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, you can securely share files internally and externally. However, it is important to understand the different Data Classification levels and acceptable ways to share your files (Data Protection Guidelines).
Guidance Table for Sharing Data
| Link Type | Confidential | Sensitive | Public |
|---|---|---|---|
| Specific People Internal User | Acceptable | Acceptable | Acceptable |
| Specific People External User | Acceptable Use good judgment | Acceptable Use good judgment | Acceptable |
| People in TWU (Internal Link) | Never | Acceptable Not Advisable | Acceptable |
| Anyone with the link (Open Link) | Never | Never | Acceptable Use expiration date when possible |
Other Common Tools Supported at TWU
Some courses may require you to attend virtual class sessions, upload videos, conduct surveys, create e-portfolios, or develop other media. The following is a list of common tools that you might need to acquaint yourself with. In this course, we will utilize Zoom and WordPress, introducing these tools as they become relevant.
- MS Teams
- MS Stream
- Zoom
- Survey Monkey
- WordPress
Also see Media Creation tutorials for Audio editing, Video editing, and other media tips.
Note that the TWU Service Hub is always available to help! Please reach out if you have any questions. TWU also has a Knowledge Base website with guides on technology tools you will likely need to use.
References
The following are key references used in this course.
Unit 5
Wenger, E. (2014) Communities of practice: a brief introduction, accessed 10 October, 2023
Teaching in a Digital Age – Second Edition by A.W. (Tony) Bates is used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 Licence.
[Creating Communities of Practice](https://www.communityofpractice.ca/background/what-is-a-community-of-practice/] from ERLC, a member of Alberta Regional Professional Development Consortia (ARPDC). Used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.
Floridi, L. (Ed.). (2015). The Onlife Manifesto – Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. Springer.
Unit 6
Eaton, S. E., & Kumar, R. (Eds.). (2023). Academic Integrity Lessons: Practical Ideas for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. University of Calgary. Calgary, Canada.
References
Footnotes
For real…using Zotero will literally save you days of tedious work during your university career!↩︎
Reference: Tsvetkova, R. 99 Amazing Social Media Statistics and Facts Brandwatch↩︎
Reference: Duggan, M. (2014, October 22). Online Harassment){target=“_blank”} Pew Research Center↩︎
Reference: McKinsey & Company (2022, August 17). “What is diversity, equity, and inclusion?” McKinsey & Company (2022)↩︎
Reference: McKinsey & Company (2022, August 17). “What is diversity, equity, and inclusion?” McKinsey & Company (2022)↩︎